


Theory of Mind

by seventymilestobabylon



Series: Claims of the Crown Forgotten [1]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-16
Updated: 2016-06-16
Packaged: 2018-07-15 08:53:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 28,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7215871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventymilestobabylon/pseuds/seventymilestobabylon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or, five things Steve didn't let Tony buy him, and one thing he did</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Rodin Fragment

Tony was the only one of the Avengers Steve still didn’t understand. Strike that: There was a lot he understood about Tony Stark, but very little he ever seemed able to predict. For instance, he understood that Tony liked the rush of adrenaline and would go chasing after it one way or another any time he got bored (or angry or sad or elated or, or, or). But the space between that _one way_ and that _another_ was wider than Steve liked, and it included both helping the Avengers wipe out alien invaders and taking the suit for drunk joyrides into space.

“Testing my limits, Cap,” he would say, coming back from one of the latter incidents, red-eyed and breathless.

Most times, Steve was able to restrain himself. If there was one thing about Tony Stark that was perfectly, without exception, predictable, it was that he didn’t like being told not to do something he wanted to do.

(He shared this trait with your average American toddler.)

When they first came to live at Avengers Tower, Tony kept out of the way of the others, and Clint joked that Tony Stark didn’t want to get his millionaire hands dirty consorting with riff-raff.

Steve was not far enough removed from being riff-raff for this not to sting. Though Clint was joking. And Clint had grown up rough so if anyone was going to joke about being riff-raff, and have it not hurt, it should be Clint.

Even when Tony started coming downstairs for dinner, he gave the impression that he, well, not that he was above them. More that he owned them. As if living in Avengers Tower had turned them all into his paper dolls. As if being a genius, and rich, meant that everyone else’s lives and brains and feelings counted less.

It was okay when they were in the field. Tony questioned him more than the others did, and that was risky and stupid and got him yelled at by Director Fury in debriefs afterward, but generally he did what Steve asked. Ordered. For best results, ordered in a way that sounded like asking.

So it was unusual for Steve to go into a job feeling that Tony was the Avenger he could best rely on to do as he was told and keep things professional.

They were taking out a Hydra facility in Atlanta, drawing from plans and intel that one of Nat’s connections had gotten for them, and everyone apart from Tony was antsy as hell. Nat had a chip on her shoulder a mile wide when it came to Hydra, and Clint did too, on her behalf; Sam and Steve knew way the hell too much about the kinds of—well, you couldn’t call it by any name other than torture, as far as Steve was concerned—that Hydra inflicted on their trainees and, particularly, their captives. The building was supposed to be an educational and recruitment facility, but Steve couldn’t shake a tiny frisson of fear that they would find Bucky here, captive again, screaming, ready to do murder.

Tony was the only one who was looking at it with any objectivity, and that wasn’t the kind of operation Steve preferred to run.

“I don’t want to work with SHIELD on this,” said Clint, as the quinjet touched down about a mile from their target. He meant that Natasha didn’t, but Nat was being a good soldier, because it was Steve’s op.

“I don’t know how much choice we have,” Steve said. “It’s been reconstituted since—well.”

The SHIELD agents had flown down separately, the week before, to stake out the building, to watch for unusual movement. Signs that Hydra had been warned in advance. Weapons transport. The Winter Soldier. Anything. Tony hacked their camera feeds, to make sure that they were reporting accurately. They were as sure as they could be, and SHIELD were only the drivers. They would be lightly armed, nothing more; the Avengers were the big guns.

“Clint and Nat go in first,” Steve continued, pretending that Clint’s question had been part of a customary mission review. “You’ll take out the front line of guards, quiet as you can, and clear a path for Tony to get into their control room. Once you’re in, Tony, top priority is to lock down any sleeping quarters you can access. _Then_ you can start downloading data. We want as much info as you can get us.”

Tony was halfway in his suit, as usual when they were flying. He was paranoid about the quinjet crashing and having to suddenly rescue all the non-fliers. “That’s very commandery, Cap. You practice that in the mirror?”

Steve ignored him. “I’ll be outside giving cover to the SHIELD vans, in case someone does manage to raise the alarm, and Sam will be providing air support. I want everyone to keep me updated on the comms as often as possible, Sam, you too. They shouldn’t have any idea that we’re coming, but I want to keep this running smooth.”

“Lee,” said Tony.

They had made their rendezvous point with SHIELD and were halfway to the Hydra facility before Steve realized that Tony wasn’t saying someone’s name, or making an obscure reference he knew Steve wouldn’t get. He was correcting his English: Keep this running smooth _ly._

Time and place, Steve wanted to retort, but it was way too late now.

“Keep updating on the comms,” Steve ordered, as Nat and Clint split off from the group and headed for the back fence. “You too, Tony. Nobody takes any risks on the initial run. Lock down anything that can be locked down, and we’ll go in for clean-up later.”

Nat wasn’t much for chatter on the comms, so Clint filled in for her, under his breath, updates on both their whereabouts.

They’d gotten the plans from city hall, because apparently Hydra filed all their building permits very promptly, but Steve wasn’t counting on their accuracy. For one thing, buildings (like people, like Avengers ops) were never exactly what you planned them to be, and for another thing, Hydra was no more prone than Tony Stark to letting the whole world know where to find all their stuff.

“Hey!” said a voice on Clint’s comm.

Steve tensed. He hated being on the outside, listening in. If Clint and Natasha weren’t the stealthiest two, if the op could instead have required—

“Widow took care of it,” said Clint, after some thudding.

“Take care of it yourself, the next time.” Nat’s voice was still and flat, and Steve could hear the edges of her accent. Bad sign, bad sign, bad damn sign.

“You can send in Iron Man,” Clint said, finally. “Cleared the—” His comm cut out, then came back in, stronger. “—plenty of room. Widow and I’ll keep moving.”

(He meant that he had Nat’s six. That he wouldn’t let her take any stupid risks. Steve was glad he was there. Clint played dumb sometimes, but he was a hell of a team player, when he wanted to be.)

“Thanks,” said Steve. “Widow?”

“Control room’s clear,” said Nat, though Clint had already said that. Steve should have left her home. He should have taken someone else (but there was no one else). Nobody’s heads were clear on this. When you went in with emotions running high, people got hurt. Every damn time.

Count on it.

A weight thunked down onto Steve’s shoulder, and he jolted.

“Hey, whoa,” Tony said, taking his gauntlet away and holding both hands up to prove he was harmless, though Tony, as Iron Man (for that matter, as Tony Stark), was the furthest thing from harmless. “Just checking up on you, grandpa. I’m heading in, okay?”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “Yeah. Yeah. I’m—keep me posted.”

“It’s a milk run, Cap,” said Tony. He clicked his helmet closed and shook his arms loose as he advanced on the building. Hydra’s building.

Steve wished he wouldn’t. Call it simple, it turns out complicated. He wasn’t a superstitious man, but.

It was a bad op, it was always going to be a bad op. Nobody had their head in the game, which meant a bad op, and superstitions weren’t going to make it better or worse.

Tony chattered nonstop on the comms, going into the building. He talked so much that Clint said, “Shut _up,_ Iron Man,” which might have been real annoyance on Clint’s part, or might have meant that he noticed Natasha was getting angry.

Tony shut up.

Neither Clint nor Natasha was being any too gentle with the Hydra agents as they started herding them out of the building, zip-tied and spitting angry. Steve considered whether he would have let prisoners be shoved around like this, if it weren’t for Bucky, and decided that he didn’t give a damn, because there was no _if it weren’t for Bucky._

“Keep moving,” Steve barked at them. (Tony would have made fun of the way his voice sounded.)

To a man, their eyes widened when they saw him, his shield, his uniform. So they hadn’t expected anything like this, maybe hadn’t considered their facility important enough for the Avengers to deal with it personally: Good. That meant, should mean, fewer weapons inside, fewer defenses.

“Iron Man, do you have the sleeping quarters locked down?” said Steve.

No reply.

Natasha cut someone’s throat. The blood came over her gloved hands in a dark rush, and the body slid to the ground in front of Steve with a sick thump. Maybe he deserved it. Maybe there was something he said to Nat, some way he moved, that told her he was a threat. Maybe.

Still, Steve said, “Widow. Let’s keep the L91s to a minimum, huh?”

“She is,” said Clint.

Not like you would care, Steve nearly snapped. Clint never did any of his paperwork, even the really important forms, things like L91s that were subject to committee oversight, and they should be because killing people was serious and had to be treated seriously.

He was not going to snap at Clint. Save it for the debrief. “Iron Man. Report.”

Nothing.

“Iron Man, come in,” said Sam, helping. He was aloft by this time, keeping eyes on everything from above.

The SHIELD agents they’d sent were young, scared. Antsy. Three of them were buckling the Hydra agents into the wrist and ankle cuffs in the armored truck. Even with Clint and Natasha there for backup, Steve didn’t like it.

 _Fucking Hydra infiltrator bullshit,_ Tony would have said. All the experienced agents gone, everyone who could act with competence in this, everyone Steve could rely on.

“Come in, Iron Man,” Sam said again.

“Iron Man,” Steve repeated, sharply. “Come in.”

Not that these kids weren’t doing a good job. Wasn’t much to it, but they were doing fine. Steve gave the nearest one an encouraging smile.

Natasha glanced at Steve on her way back to the building. As he met her eyes, he knew they were thinking the same thing. Tony would have his faceplate down, his gauntlets rolled back. He wasn’t defenseless whatever he did, Tony wasn’t, he’d be angry with Steve for worrying. But.

Hydra had, they had facilities, they had chairs and tubes and cryo chambers, they put you in them and—

Everything that was in your brain, every frustrating, bewildering thing—

“I want eyes on Tony,” Steve said. “Hawkeye?”

“You got it, boss.” Clint didn’t mention that you weren’t supposed to say names on the comms. Heck with it, thought Steve. Everyone knew who Iron Man was, Tony didn’t keep it a secret. All of them were blown, truth be told.

Sam swore and banked left.

“Falcon, report!” Steve ordered.

Though he had missed the noise of the first shot, Steve heard the second, and the third. He couldn’t get a line on where they were coming from, except that it was high. Far above where Steve could toss his shield and put them out of commission.

Sam sounded a little out of breath. “Missed,” he said. “Give the civilians cover.”

“Not civilians,” Steve muttered, but he shifted, shielding the glass of the van doors. “Widow, Hawkeye, we’ve got snipers on the upper level or the roof, must be an area that wasn’t on the building plans. Get up there and disable them. Falcon and I will cover down here; let us know if you need one of us inside. Iron Man, _come the hell in._ ”

“He’s fine, he’s okay,” said Sam.

For a second, Steve thought Sam meant that he had Tony in sight, but of course it wasn’t that. It was platitudes.

A handcuffed Hydra agent went down without a sound.

It wasn’t SHIELD they were aiming for. It wasn’t Steve, or Sam. Whoever was up there shooting downward at them, their first priority was to protect their information.

“All agents, fall back to defended positions,” Steve ordered. The SHIELD agents stopped trying to show off their bravery and ducked backward, getting themselves low, out of the lights. “Leave the enemy, it’s not worth the risk. Hawkeye?”

“On our way up,” said Clint, out of breath. “I’ll get the fucker.”

"Falcon, if you can get high enough to get an angle on the sniper, take the shot,” said Steve. To hell with the Hydra agents. Let them all die, if it meant Steve didn’t lose a man on this op, if it gave Tony time to pull everything off their servers. _Milk run,_ Tony had said.

Sam was a marvel when he flew, elegant lines. You could mistake him, up very high and at night, for a bird. He was that natural in the air. Born to it. Whereas Tony—

A bullet clanged into Steve’s shield.

“Widow, do you have eyes on—” No, she couldn’t. He had assigned her elsewhere. “Iron Man, _come in._ ”

Flight was something Tony had stolen. He cheated the air with it. That edge of wildness in his voice, when he flew, that was because he knew it. He was all the ambition of a Daedalus, but he wasn’t foolish enough to put his trust in wax.

They cracked open your skull, Hydra did, they dug out everything inside it and filled up the empty spaces with muck, poison, murder.

Tony hadn’t said a word in almost ten minutes.

To hell with it. In their armored truck. Steve dropped to a crouch, waiting for the space between shots so that he could go in. He knew he couldn’t go in, leaving the Hydra captives and the SHIELD agents undefended. But he couldn’t lose an agent on this. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, lose anyone else to Hydra. Not in this lifetime.

Sam’s voice crackled, “Fuck!” and above Steve’s head, far, far above, a silhouetted shape that looked like a bird began to tumble.

No.

_No._

Everything was slow. Sam was falling, and Tony—

“Iron Man, come the _hell in,_ ” Steve demanded. His voice shook.

In the sky, Sam was trying to get control back, slowing his descent with the wing that still worked. God, not Sam too. Sam’s breathing, on the comms, was labored, and the wind that rushed past him was drowning out the sounds of his pain. Here, down below, Steve’s people were beyond his ability to protect. _God, please, please._

“Got him,” said Natasha’s voice. “Just the one, but I’ll do a sweep.”

Steve didn’t hear the impact when Sam landed. Sam groaned, then said, “He got me good, Cap. Sorry about that.”

“Injuries?” Steve called. “Hawkeye, find Iron Man, Sam needs a hospital.”

“Broke some shit,” said Sam. His voice was sticky and uneven.

“On it,” Clint said.

“Keep updating me,” Steve said. “Sam, I’m sending Iron Man to you as soon as—”

“Goddammit, Stark,” Clint barked, so loudly that it hurt Steve’s ears. “Cap, he’s fine, apart from being an insubordinate piece of shit, which we already goddamn knew. Get the _fuck_ —”

“Hey,” said Tony’s voice.

“Sam’s injured,” Steve said, the first, most important thing. “Get out here and fly him to the hospital. I told _everyone_ to stay active on comms.”

“You told me,” said Tony, and one booted foot of his suit appeared at the gateway where he had disappeared, way too long ago. “You said lock down the—bedrooms—done, by the way, not that I ever get any thanks—and then get the data. Don’t blame me cause your—Nazi fucks went analog.”

At first Steve thought he was wounded, because his step, the suit, coming out of the building, was irregular, his speech came in spurts, and his helmet was snapped up, his mouth bunched up at one side. But no: Tony was dragging two large metal crates behind him, one in each hand.

“Get Sam to the hospital,” Steve ordered. He was too furious to say more. Milk run.

“Falcon,” Tony corrected.

He could never leave well enough alone, Tony Stark, he couldn’t—

“East side,” said Sam in the comms. “Not too much blood but uh—”

Like that, Tony was gone. Blame him for anything you wanted, but he feared responsibility for someone else’s death more than the rest of them. Which was pretty goddamn ironic when you thought about all the people who must have died from the weapons he’d created, or his father had, over the years.

(Including Steve.)

***

It was another three hours before Steve was able to leave the op behind. If SHIELD had been what it used to be—

Steve had a policy about ifs. They were dangerous roads to walk down.

Anyway, they’d had to gas the whole building, which Steve didn’t like doing without Tony there to check their science, and then toss on gas masks and go in armed, dragging out the trainees and officers and whoever else, one by one by one by one. Wait for a second SHIELD truck to get there, because they’d underestimated how many Hydra agents could be packed into a building this size. Load them onto the buses, cuff them all in. Clint’s legs were shaky with exhaustion by the end, carting out bad guy after bad guy in awkward fireman’s carries. Nat had just dragged them, careless of their heads on the gravel and cement.

Four hours was getting off easy.

Four hours, then another forty minutes in Atlanta traffic to the Piedmont emergency room, which might have been the closest as the crow flies but wasn’t anything like the closest in a car. Steve was humming with so much tension that Natasha, who was driving, punched him in the shoulder.

“Ow,” he protested.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” said Nat.

“So you’re hitting me?” He made a joke of it, glancing back at Clint like _can you believe her?_ Clint didn’t play along, and Natasha’s expression didn’t change, so he dropped the joke and said, “Thanks, Nat.”

Because he made a point of visiting any agents wounded in his ops, Steve was something of a connoisseur of hospitals. Piedmont had better parking than most, he’d give it that. The gift shop was closed, but of course it was closed, it was the middle of the night, that wasn’t Piedmont’s fault. And the big good thing was that the ER let two people in at once (a lot of places only allowed one), which meant Steve could go straight in, uniform and all.

When Steve got to the room, Sam was laughing. Tony was making him laugh. For no reason he could identify, this flooded Steve with fresh rage, the instinct to shove Tony up against the wall by his throat.

The Iron Man suit was a red-and-gold briefcase, tucked neatly under a chair.

“Hey, Cap,” said Sam.

Tony glanced up at him fast, then looked away. “Well,” he said. “I’ll leave you to it, birdbrain. Call Pepper if there’s anything you need.”

Call Pepper. Not, call me. Steve exhaled slow and long and stepped tidily out of Tony’s way when Tony left the room. He left his suit behind, which meant he wasn’t leaving leaving, which meant that when Steve’s presence was no longer required in Sam’s room, he’d be able to find Tony and have words with him.

“It wasn’t his fault, Cap,” said Sam.

“Well, hell, Sam.” He meant for there to be a second part to that, a joke about covering for Tony, or about Sam’s social worker dislike for apportioning blame, but he couldn’t find his way to whatever he’d thought he was going to say next.

“Bad op,” Sam said.

“Bad op,” Steve agreed.

“You know it’s a bad op when you have to send someone to pararescue the pararescueman.” Sam was grinning at Steve, trying to get him to laugh.

“You shouldn’t have been put in that position,” said Steve stiffly. “Tony should have been back out by that time. He should have stayed in communication with us. He would have been the natural person to take out the sniper. Now you’re out of commission, and—”

“It’s not his—”

“Anyway,” said Steve. He didn’t want to argue with Sam. “What’d the doctor say?”

“Waiting on some test results. X-rays. They’re still tryna decide—” Sam yawned. “If I need surgery.”

“Gave you something for the pain?”

“Mm-hm, yep. Tony got them—” He yawned again. “Give me an extra. Dose.”

“I bet,” muttered Steve.

“Not his,” said Sam blearily. “Not his fault. Flying down. My.”

Making an effort while Sam was still in shape to pay attention, Steve managed a chuckle. “Don’t worry about it, soldier. Rest up.”

When Sam was finally asleep, Steve shut his eyes too. He didn’t get tired the way regular people did, didn’t need as much sleep, but he felt like death now, after this night.

As a kid, if he had nightmares, he would go shuffling into his mother’s room and tell her, “I’m having bad thoughts.” Grown now, there wasn’t anything he could do, nobody he could seek out who would chase the images out of his head.

Sam, falling. High, high above him, and Steve couldn’t fly.

Bucky’s eyes when he wasn’t Bucky. Hydra had scooped Steve’s friend’s brain out of Steve’s friend’s body and left behind—

Drifting between sleep and wakefulness, Steve dreamed of Bucky in the chair where Hydra tortured him. Sometimes the man being tortured, lost to himself, was Bucky, or sometimes Steve, or sometimes Tony. Steve jerked awake and drifted back to sleep again and again. Every time he woke up, he reminded himself: _Just a dream._

(It wasn’t a dream. It happened. It happened to Bucky and it could happen to any of them if they didn’t destroy Hydra. Tony’s voice could have fallen silent on the comms first, and then forever, he could be gone the way—)

Eventually, Sam’s parents got there. Mr. and Mrs. Wilson shook Steve’s hand and said it wasn’t his fault, but he could see fault in their eyes.

“They’re letting you both back here?” Steve asked, when he couldn’t stand listening to them excuse him anymore.

“Looks like,” said Sam’s dad.

Sam’s mother put her hand on Sam’s forehead. He hadn’t woken up, still.

“They gave him morphine,” Steve explained. “And some other stuff, I don’t know. They’re moving him to a room downstairs and giving him a cast as soon as the doctor gets in and a room comes available downstairs. I’ve left a card with the nurse, and another on Sam’s bedside table. Call any time, day or night. Anything you need, we’ll—he’s an Avenger so we’ll take care of it.”

Technically Sam wasn’t an Avenger. Steve didn’t give a damn about any of it.

He brought Tony’s briefcase-suit out to the lobby, his shoulders squared for a fight. Like always when Steve wanted to talk to him, Tony was stern and focused and undisturbablem pacing up and down the room, messing with his phone. Clint and Natasha where nowhere to be seen. “Tony,” Steve barked.

Tony glanced up, and his face changed. He looked—braced. A second later, Steve was sure he had imagined it, and Tony was off his phone and onto on one of his tirades. “Okay okay, this day had to come, have at it, Captain America. I messed up the plan for the star-spangled man. You asked me to get the data, and I got the damn data, well fucking hidden though it was—”

“Can I please—”

“—but no, right, your new boyfriend got hurt so now I should have magically known there was a sniper on the roof and stopped that from happening—”

(It wasn’t the onslaught of words. It was the way he never seemed to _care_ about the words. Like words and ideas were an infinitely renewable resource and he could keep trying them out forever until he found the ones that got him what he wanted. Like it didn’t matter what they—what he—actually meant.)

Steve started, “I asked you to—”

“—and just disregarded the mission objective you fucking asked for!” Tony’s voice rose to a shout as he reached the end of the sentence. Both of them glanced around guiltily, but the room was mostly empty anyway.

Before Tony could gear up for another round, Steve said, “It isn’t your fault what happened to Sam.”

Tony’s chin tilted up. It made him look wary (but he always looked wary, at least with Steve). “Really.”

“Yeah. Could we have used better air support? Sure. But it’s outside of your control. We made plans the best we could, and mostly that worked out okay.” Steve drew in a breath. “I told you to keep updating me on comms, Tony.”

“Control room killed the signal,” said Tony with a shrug.

That wave of rage swamped Steve again, and he shoved it back. Letting himself be as out-of-control furious with Tony as he wanted to be wouldn’t accomplish anything. “That would have been pretty good information for your mission leader to have, don’t you think? I told you to keep updating me on comms. Nat and Clint were all over the place on this mission and I was counting on you to help me keep this running smoothly.”

Tony swung his shoulder sideways, the way he did when he was telegraphing surprise, like he’d been stopped in his tracks by Steve’s words. Like everything Tony did, it was fake. For show.

(Not everything. Be fair.)

(Steve wasn’t in the mood to be fair.)

“Well, I’d say counting on me was your _first_ mistake, Cap, but—”

Steve snapped, “This isn’t a _joke,_ Tony. Sam could have died.” You could have been captured, and we wouldn’t have known, for how many minutes we wouldn’t have known. You arrogant jerk. You think you’re unvulnerable, but you don’t know, you haven’t seen, you don’t goddamn know how breakable your mind is.

The automatic doors slid open, and Clint and Natasha sauntered in with greasy bags of McDonald’s burgers and fries. Natasha was licking salt off her fingers. “Germs,” protested Clint. “Steve, Tony, anyone want to eat some unhealthy shit?”

“His parents got here,” Steve said curtly to them. “I’ll stick around until the surgery’s finished and he’s in a room. You guys can all head out and get some rest. You did good work today.”

He didn’t look at Tony. He told himself it wasn’t pointed.

***

The whole time they were in Atlanta, which was another week, because Sam’s parents insisted he take some well-deserved vacation on Uncle Sam’s dime, Steve kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. He kept thinking that two cracked ribs, a broken leg, and cuts and bruises weren’t the extent of it, and they’d find out worse.

Sometimes Steve felt like he’d spent the last two years braced for disaster. Ever since they pulled him out of the ice.

But this time, at least this time, there was nothing. Sam, Steve, and his parents flew back up to New York on one of Tony’s jets, and Sam had strict instructions to rest the leg as much as possible and not lift anything heavy.

The rest of the Avengers had been back in the tower for a while by the time Steve returned. Traces of them everywhere: Clint’s fletching supplies, Nat’s hair ties, Tony’s metal doodles.

When Steve wasn’t in residence, nobody did any dishes. Nobody did any chores except for Bruce, if he was in town, and he wasn’t. The kitchen sink was empty of dirty dishes, and the hand towels were clean and folded in the wrong drawer, which meant that Tony had hired someone, which Steve had expressly asked him not to do.

“I’m a job creator!” Tony had protested.

“I can do them,” Steve had said wearily.

He left the kitchen, feeling frustrated, and went upstairs to dump his stuff, the things he’d bought on the cheap in Atlanta because he was damned if he’d let Tony pay for express-shipping for Steve’s own clothes. Steve wasn’t always sure he knew exactly where the line should be, when Tony should be allowed to pay as the bankroller of the Avengers, and when he was doing a financial favor for Steve as a friend, which Steve was in no mood to accept.

The cleaner had been in his rooms, too. Everything smelled tastefully of lemon.

He’d worry about it another time, Tony’s (un)awareness of appropriate boundaries. Right now he just wanted to sleep for a week, in his own bed.

He dreamed of falling. In his dreams, he fell and fell, and the ice never killed him.

**

It was another week again before Steve was able to get access to the Hydra papers. Tony had flown them back to New York separately, using some newly-designed magnet gadget that he’d invented for his suit, because of course it would have been too easy to pack them on the helicarrier and send them back with Clint and Nat. After that, Tony had asked Pepper to arrange to have them screened for bombs, bugs, or booby traps (which in Steve’s opinion would have been a great thing to do before flying them a thousand miles up the coast); and after _that,_ because he was Tony, he did a whole bunch more tests on them himself.

“Doesn’t trust the techs,” Natasha explained.

“Of course he doesn’t,” said Steve.

When they were finally delivered to the Avengers common area (Steve had asked for them to be sent to his floor), Steve settled himself onto the floor between the two and started unpacking them. There were a lot of receipts. There were a truly unbelievable number of receipts.

Natasha came by in the middle of all this. She looked disgustingly well-rested. “Anything good?”

“Help me look if you want.”

Nat laughed. “Give me the Cliff notes.”

Since Steve had no idea what she was talking about, he guessed Cliff notes were something he should have learned by now. He kept unpacking receipts. Not exactly worth Sam’s broken leg. Not worth the two men Natasha had killed. He couldn’t help wondering if there had been more, other papers, more valuable information, that Tony had left behind.

“Steve?”

“Still looking through it. Nothing yet.”

When he looked up again from his work, Natasha was still leaning against the door, her posture unchanged, but the lines of her mouth had gone tense. Nat didn’t have many tells. By this time, Steve knew them all. “What?” he said.

“Just—”

“Hey, Cap.”

Steve sighed. “Hey, Tony.”

They hadn’t seen each other since Atlanta. Steve hadn’t been avoiding Tony, exactly, but he’d been at least cautious about venturing into common areas at times when he knew Tony didn’t have work to tend to. When Steve looked up properly, Tony had come in from the hallway, cradling something wrapped up in brown paper.

He looked fresh as a daisy, as if everything that happened in Atlanta had meant nothing to him. Even his tie was crisply knotted, its deep green bringing out the hint of green in Tony’s brown eyes. Of _course_ he was wearing a tie, even though it wasn’t business hours and anyway, Tony could just as well have done all his work in regular-person clothes, considering he owned the company and only ever did exactly what he wanted.

“Got you something,” Tony said, and he tossed the paper-wrapped package to Steve. “Careful, it’s irreplaceable.”

“Then why’d you just—”

“Cause I’m careless, Rogers. Keep up.” Tony’s voice carried an edge of something. You could cut your fingers on it.

Natasha made a noise of Russian-tinted disgust and vanished without a sound.

Steve unwrapped the irreplaceable package. Inside the paper, and inside another layer of bubble wrap, and another layer of paper after that, was a bronze sculpture of a hand. That was all it was: a model of a left hand, with two of the fingers curved slightly inward.

That was all it was, but it took Steve’s breath away. The delicacy of it, the perfection. Like somebody had looked at all the hands in the world and cast the best of them in bronze. Or, no: it was like somebody had looked at all the hands in the world, and discovered the thing about them that made them hands, and cast that thing in bronze. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. “How did,” he said.

“Like it?” said Tony.

Lost for words, Steve looked up. Tony was hiding a grin behind his hand. “Did you make this?” Steve asked.

Tony snorted. “Close. Rodin.”

Rodin.

But then.

The stab of disappointment was keener than Steve wanted to admit. He caught his breath around it and began, as quickly as he could bear, to wrap the perfect thing back up again. He didn’t, couldn’t, look back at Tony, the way he was smiling, expectant.

“Hey, hey, what are you doing?” Tony pushed off of the door frame and went to his knees on the floor beside Steve, pushing the papers away from the sculpture. _Rodin._ “Look, if you’re so scared of hurting it, I’ll have Pepper—”

“You think this makes it okay?” He wasn’t shouting. He was—he wasn’t shouting. He hadn’t known about the hand two minutes ago, and he couldn’t want it this much, this fast. “You think this fixes what happened to Sam?”

Tony didn’t look up from what he was doing. “I think a highly trained team of medical professionals fixed what happened to Sam. Pretty successfully, if you want to take a gander at his chart. And if I’m not mistaken, oh captain my captain, I’ve already been given absolution for that little error, _by you,_ and I can’t help but notice you’re sitting here paging through the fruits of my perpetual-fuck-up not-a-team-player labor, so I don’t know what it is about a hunk of metal that makes you think it’s time for take-backsies.”

“I can’t take this,” Steve said, retreating to ground of which he felt more certain. He pushed the half-wrapped bronze hand at Tony.

Tony rocked back on his heels. “You can’t—”

“And you can’t just buy things for the team any time you screw up.”

“Want me to play you back the suit recording for that morning?” Tony dropped the Rodin in Steve’s lap and shoved himself backward and up onto his feet. “You said, and I quote, it wasn’t your fault what happened to Sam. And then you fucking ignored me for two weeks, and now I’m bringing you this _peace offering_ —”

“I wasn’t ignoring you!”

“—for you, incidentally, not for the team, because I actually wanted to say I’m sorry—”

“You’re never sorry enough to do what you’re told instead of what you think is—”

“—didn’t listen when you said you wanted the whole team to be your fucking security blanket instead of focusing on the main objective, which as you’ll recall from our initial briefing, and please, I’ll be thrilled, fact-check me from what we have file for this one—”

Tony was always faster. He thought faster and he was smarter, and Steve could never argue with him. Still less when he was sitting on the floor holding the most beautiful thing he’d ever touched, and Tony was on his feet twiddling one of his preposterously expensive rings. “Yes, look, fine, I wanted the information but—”

“I can’t read your mind,” Tony said flatly.

“Which is why I specifically told you—”

“Okay, yeah. Fine. Would you stop wrapping it back up? I shredded the receipt, can’t take it back, you might as well keep it. Look, fine. I did the wrong thing with you. Fucking shocker. Next time I’ll, whatever, I’ll say to hell with the mission objective and make sure you never experience a moment’s worry. Happy?”

No. “Yes.”

The tape wouldn’t reattach, over the first layer of paper wrapping, but at least now he couldn’t see any part of the Rodin hand. He didn’t look up at Tony, but started swathing the crackly paper package in bubble wrap.

“No matter how short-sighted I think that is. As a futurist.”

He never let anything _go._ He never—

“I don’t want,” Steve said carefully, “for there to be— If it’s in our power to stop it, then what Hydra wanted, wants—” Because they had tried to keep it from him, but he had seen the videos, what was happening while Steve and his Howling Commandos fought their battles, what was happening in Germany, in Poland, those innumerable deaths, the scope of it. “What Hydra did, and the Nazis—I don’t want that ever to happen again.”

“Bit late for that,” said Tony.

(Bit late for what?)

The Rodin was back in its packaging, trailing stray pieces of papery tape. Steve swung himself to his feet and offered it to Tony, trying not to think about what he was giving up.

Tony nodded at the nearest table. “Leave it around for me, if you don’t want it. And for the record? I was trying to be nice.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> google it: Rodin's sculptures of hands are the most beautiful things our civilization has yet produced (not hyperbole)


	2. Agatha Christie Novels

Tony considered team dinners to be a sort of diagnostic test. He didn’t lead the team (thank Christ), but they were like his suit: If you watched for small malfunctions early on, you could save yourself a hell of a lot of trouble later. The difference with the Avengers was that you couldn’t toss a broken part out and start over with a new one. You had to work with what you had.

Tony had made his fortune tossing things out and starting over, but he wasn’t too shabby at working with what he had, either.

Avengers Tower was not a sit-down-dinner environment. For one thing, it was nearly impossible to find a meal that everyone would eat. Steve ate whatever you put in front of him for reasons of courtesy, and Clint for reasons of childhood food insecurity, but Bruce liked to experiment with food combinations that Tony and Natasha would only glare at. Thor’s cooking was 90% meat and gave everyone the sweats. Tony swore off takeout on, he would be the first to admit, an erratic and unpredictable schedule and without prior notification to the rest of the team. Bruce was prone to taking on new diets (no gluten, double gluten, no meat, no dairy, juice cleanses) to test their effect on the big guy, and Tony often, but not always, joined him in solidarity. Natasha periodically went through phases in which she would eat (and thus cook) nothing but borscht and lamb dumplings, which, Tony had said loudly and often, were the hair shirts of food.

“That’s disgusting,” Steve had said.

“See there,” said Tony. “Even Steve thinks your beet soup is disgusting.”

“In Soviet Russia, borscht eats you,” Bruce said, in a Russian accent he had acquired—Tony could only assume—from watching _Rocky and Bulwinkle_ reruns.

“So don’t eat it,” Natasha said.

“I meant it’s disgusting to think about hair in your food,” said Steve quietly.

“I put hair in your food all the time,” said Tony. “Just to see if there’s anything you won’t eat. Your stomach’s basically Thor’s shower drain right now.”

“Nay,” said Thor. “In her infinite foresight, Jane supplied me with a catcher of hair for Winter Finding. The gift purported to be from Santa, but she confessed under duress that the handwriting was her own.”

“You’re kidding, though, right?” Steve said to Tony. Tony winked at him, and Steve looked down with a smile so small Tony could have imagined it.

“Duress, huh,” said Clint.

All of which to say: Avengers Tower was not a sit-down-dinner environment, but there was a point in the day when most of them would end up in the kitchen, sitting in chairs if Steve was in the room and on counters if not, arguing over who should have washed the cast-iron skillet, eating take-out from styrofoam boxes, hunting for cumin, shouting to be heard over the food processor, and not being superheroes.

And when people missed dinners, that was a piece of diagnostic information in and of itself. Thor had been in Asgard for the last month, and Bruce was only just back from doing some kind of hippy vision quest yoga bullshit that Tony couldn’t keep up with and had no patience for. But Steve had been MIA for the last two weeks with no explanation at all, and Tony didn’t like it.

Well. The last one week, inexplicably.

The last two days, maybe a little less so.

The Rodin had been a bad idea. Obviously. It was that thing he did, that thing of buying insanely costly presents instead of making amends in a healthy way. He was at least pretty sure it was that thing. From another angle, one might argue that the money was nothing to Tony and he’d brought Steve a lovely, thoughtful gift that took into account Steve’s taste and interests (after _also,_ not that Steve had bothered to notice, making amends in the sense of paying for Sam’s medical bills and his family’s transportation, hotels, and meals throughout their stay in Atlanta), and Steve threw it back in his face because he was an arrogant prick who’d die before he’d relinquish a single inch of his precious moral high ground.

Both ways of looking at it seemed plausible, to Tony.

It was a relief, then, when Steve walked into the kitchen with Bruce the following Thursday. If his face was still slightly overcast, he was at least _there,_ for once. Tony was caught sufficiently off guard that his “Oh hey” at Steve sounded not only surprised, but pleased too.

Steve waved back at him, and that was its own surprise.

“Would anyone want to watch _The Philadelphia Story_ this evening?” said Bruce, as Steve crossed to the refrigerator and got out a small pot containing his leftover mashed potatoes. (They were almost a week old, but it wasn’t any of Tony’s business.) “I got it at the library.”

Tony snickered.

“Why is that funny?” said Steve—loudly enough that it should have been a warning.

“You go to the library too, grandpa?” Tony said.

“Yes,” Bruce said. “Actually. We went together. Steve wanted to see the lions, and then we got some books across the street afterward. And _The Philadelphia Story._ What do you think, Tony, you up for a movie night?”

Tony batted his eyes at Steve. “I’ll show you some lions, baby.”

“What’s that even supposed to mean?” said Natasha. “You can’t say something in a sexy voice—”

“My voice _is_ sexy, crumpet, thanks for noticing.”

Steve, stirring his mashed potatoes on the smallest burner, ignored them both.

“Let’s—consider your options here,” said Tony. “Jarvis—”

“Sir?”

“No, shut up, go back to sleep, I’m making a point. Rhetorically. Jarvis has a library of movies rivaled in size only by—”

“Your dick,” suggested Clint.

“Great point, great contribution, yes, you’re a valued member of the team and I’m going to fast-track that raise of yours, Barton. I was going to say his library of books, though I’m willing to put that on hold to pursue Clint’s line of—”

Bruce glanced at Steve. “Tony.”

“No, look, I’m saying you can just—”

“Do you _ever_ stop talking,” said Steve, slamming down his fork. The spoon rest shattered.

That shut everyone up, momentarily, and an instant after, everyone started talking at once (except Tony), to try and abort whatever unforgiveable thing Tony would say. Because they were, you’ll pardon the word, stupid, and could not recognize a diagnostic stress test when they saw one in action. Steve had snapped like a rubber band.

“Steve, come on,” said Bruce, and Natasha said, “Don’t be a jerk,” and Clint catapulted a forkful of pad thai at Steve’s head.

Steve flicked noodles off his cheek. “Look.”

“Steve,” said Bruce.

Steve turned off the burner under his mashed potatoes. He put his fork into the dishwasher, tines up. He glanced at Tony, briefly, then at Natasha. And he left.

“Rude,” Tony remarked, not offended. He was mostly enjoying the novel feeling that the Avengers were on his side in an argument with Steve.

Novel, and brief. “You could have been nicer,” Bruce pointed out.

“Could’ve.”

“He’s feeling crummy, he doesn’t really mean anything by it.”

Ah, then this was what it felt like to be other people when someone near Tony—usually Rhodey or Pepper, but Steve sometimes and Bruce sometimes, nowadays—was explaining why Tony was the way he was. Tony felt impatient with it. He didn’t need Steve explained, or his own feelings protected. He needed to iron this out, this, find out how to get to the heart of this flaw in the team, and fix it. Before the next mission, ideally. Time was always of the essence with them. Risks of being a superhero.

“Not hungry,” Tony announced. (Easier to let the team think he was offended than to sit through them trying to persuade him not to go after Steve. They didn’t think Tony was capable of talking nicely to anyone, which was mainly because Tony rarely bothered exerting himself to talk nicely to _them._ They had Bruce for that, or Natasha and Clint in a pinch. Tony’s talents lay elsewhere.)

Steve hadn’t even set the elevator controls on his floor to private. As good as a handwritten invitation to come reason with him.

“Knock knock,” he said at the doorway to Steve’s living room.

Steve’s voice said, “Sorry. Come in. Sorry.”

The sectional couch—which Tony had picked out on purpose to blow Steve’s mind—was up against the wall with the door. When Tony poked his head around, making a show of tentativeness, he found Steve sitting on the floor, his back to the curve of the couch. Beside him was a large pile of library books.

“Feeding your brain instead of your stomach,” Tony remarked. “That’s good, Cap, we’ve been talking behind your back about how you’ve been letting yourself go.”

Steve did that laugh of his where he curved his lips a little bit and blew air out through his nose. Tony hated that laugh. Well, liked it. Well. Liked because it was the closest thing to a laugh Steve ever seemed to do. Hated that it was the closest thing to a laugh Steve ever seemed to do.

Steve said, “Shouldn’t’ve snapped at you.”

Tony waved a hand. “Think nothing of it,” he said grandly.

“I read some things.”

“You should let me supervise your reading.”

Steve not-laughed again. “I’ll think about it, thanks.”

Tony wandered into the room, a study in casual. He had left his drink upstairs on purpose because if he had a drink in his hand while talking to Steve, Steve was prone to asking _Have you been drinking?_ Tony could not, with a drink in his hand, feasibly say _no_ to this, even if he knew and Steve knew that Steve’s real question was _Are you behaving this way because you’ve been drinking?_ to which the answer was almost always, and truthfully, no.

“Couches are for sitting,” said Steve. He said it weird and staccato.

“Pushy,” remarked Tony, but he sat down.

“No,” Steve said. “I meant—I was doing you. I thought you were going to make fun of me for sitting on the floor.”

With a heroic effort of will, he made no jokes about Steve’s phrasing. “Nope. Obviously, that’s—where your books are.” He twisted his neck down to inspect the spines.

_Blood and Soil, A Problem from Hell, The Elimination, The Killing Fields—_

Light reading, then. He twisted himself back up and looked down at Steve questioningly.

“Getting myself up to speed,” Steve explained.

“On, yeah, everything depressing the library had to offer. Clearly.” There was more. Tony waited for it. If he’d had a drink in his hand, he would have sipped it. With no props it was harder to maintain an air of disinterested nonchalance.

“Bruce told me some—after you— Bruce told me some things. That I missed. It’s—I mean, they caught me up to date, SHIELD did, on the basic outlines, what happened since I went down, but there were a few things that didn’t—ah, make it into the highlight reel.” Steve put the book he’d been reading face-down on the pile. _Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa._

Tony offered, neutrally, “Ugly stuff.”

“Just—” Steve scrubbed a hand over his face. “We didn’t stop it. Not with Hitler, but not even—since then, even. Cambodia, Guatemala, Yugoslavia. When we knew what it could be, what people were capable of. We still didn’t save them.”

“You were a little busy being dead.”

“Ha.” That was the other thing Steve did instead of laughing.

Stark Industries had been a little busy making money. SI sold weapons all over, before Tony changed it, before Afghanistan. Never to America’s enemies, excepting Obadiah’s backdoor deals with terrorists. But American allies was a category that had encompassed a lot of regimes, over the decades. SI weapons had killed innocents. Tony always knew that, the scope of it, he did. He didn’t let himself forget.

“Everything changed. Used to be, I knew who the bad guys were, and I could fight them. Now it’s not—it’s—it isn’t like that. Even when I start to think it is, it really isn’t.” Steve’s lashes swept down, hiding his eyes.

Tony cast about for something to say that wasn’t completely nihilistic. “I shouldn’t have brought it up to you like that.”

“Wouldn’t have made it not true.” On the floor, with his legs stretched out in front of him, Steve looked vulnerable. Helpless.

Tony didn’t like him helpless. 

As if Tony had said the words out loud, Steve took a deep breath in and visibly drew himself together. “Anyway. It’s not—I shouldn’t have snapped at you.”

He had been going to say _It’s not your fault._ He’d had to change it. Tony shoved the thought away.

“I’ll be at dinner tomorrow,” Steve said.

“Only if you want to,” said Tony, stung. He hadn’t mentioned dinner, he hadn’t ever, to any of them. He wasn’t that easy to read.

Steve always—

Steve smiled up at Tony, that way he always smiled, sad past fixing. “I do want to,” he said.

Nothing to be said, when Steve smiled like that. Tony got to his feet. For lack of anything better, he said, “Might go through those papers from Hydra this evening.”

“Good,” said Steve, all business. “I could use another pair of eyes. Someone smarter than me. Looks like they’re all receipts. Ammunition, new citizenships. You said they were in safes?”

Tony nodded.

“Darned if I can figure out why. We know they need weapons and identities. Nothing new there. See what you can make of it.”

“Yep.” At the door, Tony swung around, leaned sideways to catch Steve’s eye again. “Hey, don’t stay up all night reading your atrocity books, grandpa. Give you nightmares.”

Steve said, “Ha.”

Since he actually was hungry, Tony went out to dinner, which was a thing he liked, eating alone, dicking around on his StarkPad, except he couldn’t get out of his mind the image of Steve on the floor of his living room, looking small. It was distracting. Distracting, and annoying, and it wasn’t Tony’s fault that—

It was distracting.

After failing to enjoy his soup or his salad, Tony gave up and had Jarvis place an order for the complete works of Agatha Christie. “Put a card with it,” he said. “‘Some things never change.’ Get the one-hour delivery, he doesn’t need to be reading twelve hundred depressing books in a row.”

“Captain Rogers’s rooms at the tower are now closed to visitors,” reported Jarvis.

Dammit. Damn superheroes. Damn Steve always trying to go it alone.

_He was depending on you in Atlanta,_ whispered a nasty voice in Tony’s head. _He wasn’t going it alone then._

“Don’t put my name on it,” Tony said. “Just—I don’t care, ask Bruce to bring the box upstairs to him, he likes Bruce.”

Stark Industries had sold weapons to Guatemala, plenty of them. To Pakistan, to Iraq. They’d ignored human rights abuses, genocides, because Uncle Sam said to, because those governments were Cold War allies, because they seemed less bad than the alternative, because because because because because.

Which Steve had known all along, in general if not the specifics, so why did—

Dinner was shit, anyway. And there were present-day bad guys, bad guys currently active, and Tony had their secret records, and he’d said he would go through them that night.

(Steve’s eyelashes were as long as a girl’s, vivid against the curve of his cheek, when he looked down, when he closed his eyes.)

Tony didn’t get home until eleven, which meant Steve would already be in bed. Although Steve didn’t need nearly as much sleep as a regular person, he got all of it at the front end, hopping into bed by ten-thirty like the clean-living Boy Scout he was at heart, and then getting up at three in the morning to go running in Central Park.

For the team’s sake, for cohesion, Tony hoped he hadn’t gone to sleep reading about the evil in the hearts of men. They saw enough of that in their day to day.

The Hydra papers were still in the common room, stuffed untidily into their heavy fireproof boxes. If Tony had needed any further evidence about Steve’s state of mind, the messiness of the papers would be it.

Privately, Tony thought it wouldn’t be terrible for Steve to permit a little more disorder into his life.

He shoved the boxes close to his favorite chair, the one that was his when they did movie nights, and pulled out a sheaf of Hydra’s crap to flip through. They weren’t all receipts, it was correspondence too, hand-written memos and letters in German and French. Leaving out how exponentially harder it was to find out what Hydra was up to if they kept all their correspondence offline, it was kind of flattering. They didn’t have anyone they could trust to keep their electronic stuff secure.

Quite rightly. Tony was unstoppable that way.

“Fear me,” he muttered.

The citizenship papers went back a few years and mostly belonged to nations in the Caribbean that sold citizenships on the cheap—Antigua, Dominica, most recently a shit-ton from the Comoros—plus a handful from Hungary, which had been substantially more expensive. Worth it, though, Tony guessed, since it would get Hydra’s agents access to the European Union, something they wouldn’t get from any of their sunny tourist destinations.

Heat-seeking missiles, big fucking deal. Grenades grenades grenades, predictable.

Antigua was nice. You could live out your life in Antigua.

Tony tossed his handful of papers aside and leaned down for another batch. As he came back up with them, his eye caught on the entertainment center.

Tidily shelved on the shelf above Bruce’s LPs was a row of pristine paperback Agatha Christie novels.

Steve had two bookshelves on his floor. When he bought a book, or was given one for his birthday, he would write his name inside it, carefully in pen, in his old-man penmanship, _Steve Rogers._ He would shelve it alphabetically: A through N on the shelf in the living room. Presumably O through Z in his bedroom.

He must not even have paged through them when they arrived, not even considered keeping them.

Tony tossed his handful of papers back in the box and crossed the room to the shelves, pulling out two of the books from opposite ends, just to check—

Steve hadn’t written his name in them. Of course he hadn’t. If he’d been planning to keep them, he’d have kept them in his bedroom. Jesus, like Tony’s money would soil him if it ever touched him, never mind that the roof over his fucking head—

It must gall him. Steve. To have his home paid for by blood money, Stark Industries, Tony.

Tony put the book back— _Murder on the Orient Express,_ who cares—and returned to the Hydra papers. Who the fuck cared, anyway, if Steve read or didn’t read Agatha Christie? Who honestly fucking cared?

If there had been anything in here about the Winter Soldier project, Steve would have—

Which didn’t matter, either.

Tony should probably have retired to one of the Caribbean nations that Hydra now found so appealing. After he’d had his epiphany. He could have done that, instead of this. Sell out and let someone else deal with the shitfire that was Stark Industries. Come to think of it, he’d never been to the Comoros. He could have set up shop there, saved himself all this aggravation.

If Rhodey had been there, Tony would have complained to him. This is why nobody should ever let me on a team, he would say. (“This is the team you bitched to me about not being ‘qualified’ for?” Rhodes would say.) Tony would say, I don’t play well with others.

He played okay with Natasha, with Clint. Even Thor, most of the time, now that Thor had been around for long enough to know when Tony was joking and when he was serious. And Bruce was a friend. Someone Tony would call, if he needed someone.

(If Rhodes had been there, he’d have snorted at that, the idea of Tony calling someone for help.)

(Steve called Rhodes “Jim,” not that Tony gave a shit.)

It was just Steve. Something about the squareness of his jaw and the way he flinched a tiny bit if you swore near him, and his bossiness and his unbearable certainty that he was right. It made Tony behave badly, even when behaving badly wasn’t exactly his goal.

Made the Comoros look—

Tony blinked. Were the Comoros even—

Fuck.

“Jarvis,” said Tony. “The Comoros, put a map up on the screen for me, huh?”

“Yes sir.” The flatscreen lit up instantly—not as good as the interface Tony had down in his workshop, but adequate for his purposes now.

So yeah. Not the Caribbean.

If there was a way for this to be worse, Tony didn’t know what it was. The Comoros were a group of four small islands off the east coast of Africa. Just about striking distance from goddamn motherfucking Wakanda.

Nobody doubted T’Challa’s ability to take care of his own business. Also, though, nobody on the Avengers got in touch with T’Challa on a whim. If Tony contacted Wakanda in his capacity as an Avenger, it would be an international incident. There would be formalities, ambassadors, meetings.

Steve would know.

The vibranium.

Steve’s real superpower was to find a way to blame himself for everything. If he found out that Hydra was going after vibranium, in a big way like this, setting themselves up to attack Wakanda for it—

Christ, could they even be thinking about staging a coup? T’Challa was, put it lightly, not popular with his country right now, if any of the information coming out of Wakanda was true (which you couldn’t count on).

If Steve found out, he’d think it was his fault. He’d think, Hydra didn’t know about vibranium before Steve came along. Never mind that it was how many fucking years ago that he’d fought them in the first place, never mind how thoroughly that cat was out of that bag. Never mind that it was Howard’s idea, not Steve’s, to have a shield made of the stuff in the first place.

You couldn’t _reason_ with Steve was the problem. He didn’t argue the way regular people argued. He’d listen to what you were saying, and nod and acknowledge that you were making good points, and then his face would settle into sad, stern lines that showed how heavily this new burden weighed on him.

It was Stark tech. The shield. So many of the deaths in Steve’s books. Sometimes Tony thought that the suit was the only untainted thing. The one thing he had ever made and it came out right.

If Tony was wrong, then it didn’t need to matter. Steve didn’t have to know, then.

***

It was about four hours to the Comoros. Four hours was enough time to catch up on the country’s history. Twenty government coups since the islands declared their independence from France. Tony had to make Jarvis repeat that part, because it seemed so unlikely that he had heard him correctly.

He had. Twenty coups in the last forty years.

Frankly, he was surprised none of those had been aimed at Wakanda in the past. Easy to entrench among the volcanoes and forests of the islands, then launch air attacks against the mainland.

He took the suit for a spin over the three islands (he skipped Mayotte, which still belonged to France and presumably had rules about weapons import), running scans for hot spots on the energy grid. There were two buildings at the edge of the rainforest, on the smallest of the islands, that didn’t match to anything in Jarvis’s database, nor anything Tony could pull from the governmental records that were online. Could be Hydra.

Or, and Tony ardently hoped this was the case, they were industrial headquarters of some kind. A foreign company. Not finished yet with their paperwork. Not old enough yet to be on maps.

“Heading down.”

“Would you like me to notify Ms. Potts as to your whereabouts?” Jarvis suggested. Which was the kind of thing that tended to get Tony a little nervous about the level of intelligence you could expect out of an AI.

“Nobody likes a tattletale, Jarvis.”

The Hydra buildings—or whatever they were—stood out a mile, but then, as Tony had seen, they weren’t bothering with subtlety out here. They’d thought nobody would notice. They’d thought the country was small enough, poor enough—

When he got back, he’d get Pepper to send money. (That’s what he was good for, was money, wasn’t it.)

Close to, the smaller of the two buildings, the one closest to the edge of the forest, wasn’t particularly well-guarded. Four men at the front, wearing camo, no Hydra insignia anywhere. Well, that didn’t prove anything; they’d at least want to keep anyone from talking about seeing Nazis. One at the back, and probably some shitty alarms. Tony had Jarvis zap the motion detectors while he knocked out the guard.

_No, I didn’t let him see me, I’m not an amateur,_ he said coolly to an imaginary, eternally critical, Steve.

He retracted the suit legs while he was inside, to cut back on noise, though he didn’t think they likely had regular patrols. “Be wrong,” he muttered to himself, slipping through a likely-looking hallway. “Be wrong be wrong be wrong—”

But he was Tony Stark, and he was rarely wrong.

The interior was what he had expected, dreaded, weapons and body armor. Some of it aligned with what he remembered seeing on the receipts from the Georgia facility, and some of it must have been purchased on blacker, worse-organized markets. Some of the sliding shelves had rows and rows of identical guns, shotguns or assault rifles, and drawers underneath that Tony guessed contained ammo.

“Tidy,” he remarked. “You getting this, J?”

“Shall I send the footage back to Avengers headquarters?” Jarvis inquired.

“That’s a negative.” He wanted it to be a done deal before he had to bring it to Steve: Information that he’d acted on, then shared with their ally T’Challa. Not Steve’s fault and not the Avengers’ problem. T’Challa would call on them if he needed their help; and T’Challa never needed their help (the other way around, far more often).

On his way out, Tony carefully reactivated and reset the various locks, motion sensor, and alarms, to leave as little trace of his presence as possible. The guard might report having been knocked out, but with any luck, he’d see that the door remained sealed and the contents of the building untouched, and omit the small detail of his sudden unconsciousness from official reports. Hydra weren’t exactly known for being forgiving of mistakes.

“Jarvis, can you—” Tony considered his options. “Contact the Wakandan embassy, please, and supply them with this footage. Let them know that SHIELD agents acquired it while acting on intelligence recovered from a Hydra base in Atlanta. No need to mention the Avengers. Don’t use my name.”

He dropped his cloaking devices when he got far enough up and out. Lucky to have cloud cover, as well, avoid the chance that somebody would see him leaving.

It didn’t matter, not using his own name, hiding behind SHIELD. Steve would know anyway, Tony would have to tell him when he got back, but at least it would be handled. It would be put to bed, not the Avengers’ problem anymore.

“Captain Rogers,” said Jarvis.

Tony almost said, _That’s what I’m_ saying. He caught himself in time. “What?”

“Calling. I’ll send to voicemail, shall I?” Jarvis proposed.

Smart-ass. Tony put the call through. “Captain.”

“Tony,” said Steve’s voice. “Where are you?”

“Out,” said Tony. He accelerated the suit a little; if the Avengers needed him home, it would be urgent. “Jarvis, keep updating me, please, if anything comes up. Is there a situation?”

“Me?” said Steve.

“Anyone else on this call?”

“You were talking to Jarvis. No, there’s no situation. Did you leave the country?”

“Ah—”

“There’s a log,” said Steve. “You’re supposed to sign out if you’re going to be more than an hour away.”

Tony never used the log.

“I need to know when you—” Steve sighed. Tony thought he could hear him pinching the bridge of his nose. “Are you in Africa?”

The suit veered, and Tony caught it quickly, set himself back on course. Be a hell of a way to die. Put that on his tombstone: _Here lies Tony Stark, dead from underestimating Steve Rogers’s intelligence._ He said, “I’m practicing cool Iron Man moves in the Red Desert, if you must know.”

“Okay,” said Steve. “That sounds fun.”

He didn’t mean _that sounds fun._ He meant _I’m being too polite to say that I don’t believe you._ The trick was to get off the phone before Steve managed to guilt him into coming clean. “Well, Cap, I better—”

“Hey, while I have you.”

Dammit.

“I was going through the Hydra stuff, and I just looked up some stuff about the citizenships they’ve been buying.”

“Steve, I’m actually—”

“I had an idea about what they might be up to,” said Steve, “but I’d really value your opinion, before I make a big thing out of it.”

Being a futurist, Tony felt that he had a pretty good idea of where this conversation was headed. “Yes, okay? I was in Africa. I mean, it’s a big place, long trip, technically I’m still in Africa, but I’m on my way home, so.”

“Oh, really?” said Steve innocently.

“Nobody likes a smug bastard, Rogers.”

“Is that what Sam calls negative self-talk?”

“It’s not self-talk if—” Getting the point a little late, Tony stopped.

Steve went, “Ha,” and Tony couldn’t help laughing too.

“So what’ve we got?” Steve asked.

“Pretty significant arms stockpiling in the Comoros. I don’t have any proof it’s Hydra, but I’ll have Jarvis scan the citizenship papers and send them to the Wakandan ambassador when I get home.” He was not going to apologize for going to the Comoros on his own. He didn’t owe Steve an apology.

“Thanks,” said Steve.

Leave well enough alone, Stark. “Not that I’m complaining,” Tony said, “but is there a reason you’re not ripping me a new asshole right now?”

Steve said, “Yuck,” and then, “I’d prefer that you bring me issues like this before acting on them.”

“And by prefer, you mean—”

“By prefer I mean, please bring me issues like this before acting on them. I’m the team leader, and it’s my call how we act on the intelligence we receive. I also get why you didn’t want to come to me with anything yesterday evening. Let’s just—we’ll call it even, okay? If you get the debrief report on my desk by next Tuesday, I’ll back your play to anyone who wants to pick a fight about it. Fair?”

Actually pretty unfair, for Steve. Hell of a good deal for Tony. “Okay. That’s—thanks, Steve.”

Steve made a noise that Tony couldn’t quite identify.

“What?” he said, defensive.

“Just,” said Steve. His voice carried something soft, or Tony thought it did, but when he continued speaking, he sounded normal again. “Didn’t know you knew my first name, is all. Let me know when you’re back in the nest.”

“Will do,” said Tony. He couldn’t quite believe he was getting off this easy.

“And, um—”

“Oh no, oh we’ll have to talk later, I’m going through a tunnel,” Tony said, and hung up. Better to quit while you’re ahead, he always felt, and if Steve was about to bring up the dumb fucking books and whatever dumb fucking reason he had for not accepting them, Tony didn’t want to hear it.


	3. A Milkshake

The Wakandan ambassador wanted to meet with Pepper, and Steve couldn’t even be annoyed with Tony about it. The embassy had gotten in touch with SI, and Tony very correctly referred the matter to Steve. When Steve got on the phone with the Wakandan ambassador’s scheduling assistant, she said that she appreciated his time but that her instructions were to set up a meeting with Pepper Potts, since the matter at hand concerned Stark Industries tech and did not require the intervention of the Avengers.

Steve couldn’t be annoyed with Tony about that because Tony hadn’t done anything wrong, and he couldn’t be annoyed about the Comoros either because he’d told Tony he’d be on his side.

He was trying really, really hard—with limited success—not to be annoyed at all. At dinner the week after the Wakanda thing, he made a joke about Stark Industries that led Clint to ask what his problem was with Tony.

“I don’t have a problem with him,” said Steve.

The way he did what he wanted and apologized later, or didn’t apologize at all and just threw money at it, or apologized and threw money when he wasn’t even the one at fault, or cycled through all three in such dizzyingly rapid succession that Steve never felt steady on his feet. The way he tilted his head to one side and said impossible things that he then made possible, and Steve would give anything to be able to see inside that head to the incomprehensible, maddening brain it contained. The way he acted like Steve was—like the Avengers were—part of the chorus line for a show Tony was headlining.

“Really.” Clint looked at Natasha, who raised an eyebrow at Steve.

“I’m going to eat in my room,” he said.

“Oo,” said Nat to Clint. “Someone struck a nerve.”

“Me,” said Clint to Nat. “It was me, I struck the nerve.”

They were damned annoying sometimes. It wasn’t fair to have to be in a room with the two of them and their secrets and their trust.

“Tell him the thing,” said Natasha. For an international superspy she was looking uncharacteristically gleeful.

“No, he’ll hit me. You tell him.”

“I’m not going to hit you,” said Steve. “Would you knock it off with that and just—what’s the thing?”

“Clint promised you to Stark tomorrow.” Natasha had that grin on her face. Like when she was setting him up with SHIELD agents or accountants or waitresses.

“Are you drunk?” Steve asked her.

“Nyet.”

“It’s a tech review,” explained Clint. “We’re all doing it. Stark wants to go through supplies and talk with each of us about our—” He waggled his eyebrows at Steve. “Needs. You’re meeting him at Penelope in Murray Hill—Penelope’s?—at noon.”

This. Exactly this. Like Steve was a prop that would lie motionless on the table until Tony had occasion to pick it up again. “He couldn’t tell me himself?”

“You’ve been kinda pissy with him lately,” Clint pointed out.

“Oh come on.”

“What, you have. So no wonder he doesn’t want to talk to you. Ow.” This was because Nat had swatted Clint on the back of the head. “Well he _has._ You should think about what you want, dude. I’m getting baller new heat-seeking arrows.”

“I’ll let him know I don’t need anything.”

Natasha raised an eyebrow again.

“What?” said Steve, throwing up his hands.

“Clint’s not wrong,” said Nat.

Clint closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and whispered, rapturously, “Clint’s not wrong. Clint’s not wrong. Wow.”

“You shush,” said Nat.

“Look,” Steve protested. “I’m saying, I don’t need anything. I can save him time. He’s busy, he doesn’t want to waste a whole lunch hour with me when all I’m going to say is I don’t need him to make me anything new.”

“Terrrrrrrrrible self-esteem,” said Clint to Nat.

“Or very poor imagination,” said Nat to Clint.

Steve grumbled, “I hate it when you do that.”

Nat looked innocent. “Hm? Do what? Talk to each other?”

“About me in front of me.”

“Well,” Nat said, drawing out the L, “you never listen when we do talk to you.”

“Yes I do! I—”

“So noon at Penelope then, right?” said Clint.

Steve was a good enough tactician to recognize when he’d been outflanked.

**

The restaurant was small, and sweetly decorated, not at all the kind of place Steve would have imagined Tony would choose to eat a meal. It was crowded for the lunch hour, but they led Steve to a table in the back right away, where Tony was already sitting, messing around on his phone. He didn’t look up when Steve reached their table.

“Hey,” said Steve.

“Oh!” Tony said, as if surprised to see him there. He shook back one sleeve of his perfect charcoal suit and consulted his wrist ostentatiously. (Tony didn’t wear a watch. The thing on his wrist was an expandable piece of suit.) “Is it—Captain Rogers, is this unpunctuality I’m witnessing?”

Steve checked his own wrist. His watch was an actual watch, and he wasn’t late. “Hey Tony.”

Tony put one foot on the seat of Steve’s chair and pushed it outward. “Take a seat. I ordered you a mimosa.”

“Thanks.” He didn’t like mimosas.

“Thank Uncle Sam, I’m not paying. So, you get the Wakanda stuff figured out?”

The Wakanda stuff. “Sure, I guess. Like I said, they wanted to talk to Pepper, not me.”

“People always want to talk to Pepper-not-me. You get used to it. We’re calling that one a win, right? Actionable intelligence from an Avengers recon mission, helping head off violence for our ally Wakanda—hell, are the Comoros our ally? Heading off violence for two allies at once. Earth’s mightiest heroes!”

“I guess.”

Tony made a huffy noise. “Okay then. Wakanda topic rejected, let’s give lunch food a try. We’re supposed to bring three sides of mac and cheese back to Clint, he says it’s not fair when people get to go out for mac and cheese and he’s stuck at home. ‘Stuck’ being a matter of opinion.”

“Three?”

“Oh, sorry, I was unclear. He stipulated three different area restaurants. He wants one order of mac and cheese from here, and then there’s two other places he’s going to call in orders and have us pick them up on the way back.”

Steve chuckled. “Clint’s a brat.”

“Aaaaaaaaaand we arrive at the crux of the reason Clint asked me and not you,” Tony said, not nicely.

Steve wanted to protest, _I was joking,_ except if he said that, Tony would say he’d been joking too and it would be Steve’s fault for not having a sense of humor. He picked up the menu and perused it. He wanted steak. Maybe some pie for dessert. He wanted to be somewhere else, with someone else, who didn’t take everything he said the wrong way.

“You already know what you’re ordering?” he said to Tony.

“Take your time,” said Tony, although time wasn’t what Steve had asked.

When the waitress came back, Tony asked after their drinks with stagy desperation. Steve got a cheesesteak sandwich with two sides of macaroni and cheese (one in a box) and told the waitress not to worry about his mimosa. Tony got a salmon burger and French onion soup. They handed their menus back.

“Good choice of venue,” Tony said, his voice very dry.

“Uh—okay. Yeah.”

“Rogers. Take a compliment. It’s a little twee, which isn’t too surprising considering you’re you, but not a bad choice.”

“ _You_ chose it.”

“Ah,” said Tony. “Well aren’t they just the fucking comedic duo to unseat Abbott and Costello.”

This was the problem with talking to Tony. You always ended up feeling that you’d missed a step. Steve didn’t want to say that he didn’t get it, but he’d never had much of a poker face.

“Natasha and Clint set this up as a joke,” Tony explained, in that rapid fire way he had, when his brain was moving too fast for his mouth to keep up. “Evidently. Because we’ve been—they think we’ve been fighting. I did their needs assessments in my workshop. Barton’s not getting his heat-seeking arrows for damn sure.”

Steve narrowed his eyes. “I’m eating his spare mac and cheese too.”

“Damn right.” Tony unwrapped his cutlery and set it on the table. “There you go. Well, fuck it, let’s get to tech needs. What kind of things do you need to help you do better work in the field?”

“I do okay,” said Steve.

Tony rolled his eyes. Even that, he did faster than anyone else Steve knew. One tiny flick that conveyed an ocean of contempt. “Not trying to put you in a suit of armor, Rogers. I know you like to ride bareback.”

Someone at the next table glanced over. Tony grinned at her.

Steve knew he was blushing. He’d never been able to control it. “Do you have to be crude?”

“Crude,” repeated Tony. “Why, Captain Rogers, what did _you_ hear me say? _I_ heard me employ an equestrian metaphor.”

“Some time,” said Steve, “you’re going to have to quit being mad that I made fun of your suit when I _first met you._ It’s a swell suit, Tony, okay? Can you just— I’m sorry I made fun of your suit.”

Tony was playing with the silverware, twiddling his knife between the first and second fingers of his left hand. When he did that, sometimes, Steve wanted to stop his fidgeting by force, pin his wrists to the table and hold his hands still. He imagined the sensation of Tony’s pulse under his fingers, rabbit-quick.

“So, nothing. Your tech needs are nothing.”

“Um,” Steve said. “Yes? Or. Do you think I need something?”

“Do _I_?” repeated Tony.

“Yeah, do—is there something I could be doing better, you think? If I had more stuff? You’re the one who’s good at this, thinking up new ideas for. For stuff. Uh, tech stuff.” _Stop saying stuff, you idiot._

Unexpectedly, Tony smiled at him. He met Steve’s eyes and smiled like he meant it and said, “Is disarming adorability your weapon of last resort?"

Not at all unexpectedly, Steve blushed.

“So that’s a yes,” said Tony. “Okay, well, hey, let’s do this. I’ll put together a suite of options for you, some ideas that might be useful, might not be useful, and you can come down to the workshop and have a look at the mock-ups, run them through some simulations. See what you like.”

“Yeah?” said Steve, surprised.

Tony had never asked Steve to come down to the workshop. He kept the elevator controls for the workshop floor set to private. Bruce—who was invited (he said “summoned”) down there regularly—called it the Batcave.

“Or not,” Tony said quickly.

“It’s—I wouldn’t be disturbing you?”

“Disturbing _me? _”__

__He looked so astonished that Steve couldn’t help laughing. “I thought you didn’t want us in the workshop!”_ _

__“Clint,” Tony said, enunciating exaggeratedly. “I don’t want _Clint_ in the workshop. Let a sniper near R &D and they start getting all kinds of crazy ideas. I’m the crazy idea man around here.”_ _

__“I think you have good ideas,” said Steve._ _

__Tony’s eyes flicked up to his. “That a fact.”_ _

__“I—yeah. Of course.”_ _

__With a careful clink, Tony set his knife down next to his fork and leaned his forearms on the table. He hadn’t taken his eyes away from Steve’s. It was precarious, the expression on his face; impossible to tell if it would tip into anger or cynicism or something entirely else. He said softly, “Look, would you ever—”_ _

__“French onion soup?” said the waitress, behind Steve._ _

__Without any change of expression at all, Tony leaned back in his seat and pointed downward at the table in front of him. “Looks good,” he said, and he winked at her._ _

__Steve let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding._ _

__Having food in front of them made everything easier. Steve was used to eating near Tony, even if he was used to having the other Avengers around when he did it. If he pretended that the rest of the restaurant was the other Avengers, it wasn’t hard to draw Tony out, get him to tell stories about board meetings and beta tests and an upcoming benefit gala event he was dreading and, mostly, ideas he had to make the suit better, faster, cooler._ _

__For all of the team—and maybe this was just the nature of the beast—certain subjects were landmines. Harlem with Bruce. Siblings with Thor. But where Tony was concerned, Steve seemed particularly prone to tromping into all of those subjects, and he never seemed to get any better at predicting what they would be. At any moment Tony’s eyes could narrow, and his voice could shape itself into the distant, nasty tone that was the conversational equivalent of repulsor blasts and he knew it._ _

__Still, lunch was okay. The suit was always okay to talk about (almost always) (always always if Tony was in a not-terrible mood). Tony liked talking about things he was making, and he was nice about it, he didn’t try to make Steve feel stupid for not knowing how everything worked. He’d draw wavery-lined diagrams on napkins and slide his finger over the different parts to explain them._ _

__The waitress coming to take their plates away seemed to jar Tony out of his rhythm. “So that’s basically,” he said, as if it were a complete sentence._ _

__“What would,” Steve said, and stopped, because Tony was scrooshing all the napkins, all his little diagrams, and tossing them into his mostly-empty coffee mug._ _

__Tony caught him looking. “What?”_ _

__“No, nothing. I just—nothing.”_ _

__Mercifully, Tony—not best known for leaving things alone—left it alone. Steve paid, and saved the receipts so he could file a reimbursement, and tipped a few dollars extra in cash, about which Tony also did not comment._ _

__(You could only put a fifteen percent tip on a meal you paid for with a government credit card, even though everyone had explained to Steve that you had to, these days, tip twenty percent in order to be a good person.)_ _

__“Would you want to walk back?” he said, when they got outside. The weather, which had been unresolvedly wet and cool for the last few weeks, seemed to be sliding finally in a springward direction, and it was sunnyish and warmish for the first time since Steve didn’t know when._ _

__“Together?”_ _

__“Ha. No. I was thinking you’d take one route, I’d take a different route, and we’d see which one gets who home faster.”_ _

__Tony grinned at him, and Steve felt stupidly flattered. “I’d cheat.”_ _

__“Of course you’d cheat.”_ _

__“I’d win though.”_ _

__“Winning by cheating doesn’t count.”_ _

__“Agree to disagree, Captain Jiminy Cricket Conscience Man.”_ _

__Steve looked down, smiling. When he looked back up, Tony was scanning the horizon like an old-time explorer, shading his eyes against the sun. “See anything you like?” Steve asked._ _

__“You bet,” said Tony. He leered at Steve, but it was only the ghost of a leer, like Tony trusted Steve to take the dirty joke as made without having to put in the effort of actually making it. It felt—friendly. A joke they were sharing, not one he was making at Steve’s expense._ _

__Tony swung his shoulder left, to show that he had judged it was time to start walking. “So. That was a lot of things about me. All in a row. You wanna go?”_ _

__“I liked hearing about what you’re making,” Steve said, slowly, thinking about it. “I, um, I didn’t do much sculpture when I was in art school, before. It looked neat, I just didn’t—the war. You know. Didn’t get a chance.”_ _

__“You know, Rogers, if you want something now you can actually ask for it,” said Tony. “There’s spaces all over the tower I could convert into a studio for you, and shit I don’t know, I’m not an art guy, there’s gotta be online classes you could do, or YouTube tutorials and shit.”_ _

__“I can—” Steve didn’t know how to put what he felt into words, without sounding angry (though he was angry, a little). “I’m not always asking you to fix it. When I say something.”_ _

__“Oh, he’s mad at me again,” said Tony to the air. “Stunning twist. Nobody saw it coming.”_ _

__Steve sighed. “I’m not mad at you.”_ _

__“And the sigh.”_ _

__“I’m not _mad_ at you.”_ _

__“Siiiiiiigh,” said Tony._ _

__“I’m—” Steve shook his head. “Every time I think I’m finally having an actual conversation with you, as people, it’s just like, you’re in there trying to figure out how to fix me.”_ _

___In where?_ _ _

___In your head. Your impossible brain, the whirring gears of it._ _ _

__Tony was, of course, too smart to ask that question. Instead, he said, “It’s not trying to fix you to say you can— Jesus, you can be melodramatic. It’s not trying to fix you to offer you a space to do something you enjoy. Clint’s got a fucking archery range, Bruce has all his east-facing bullshit, are you kidding me with this? And for the record—”_ _

__“I get it,” said Steve quietly._ _

__“For the record? I don’t give a fuck if you sculpt. You said it might be fun so—”_ _

__“I say a lot of things!”_ _

__“You don’t,” Tony said. “You really, really don’t.”_ _

__They both exhaled at the same time, the same way, like a yoga exercise, like counting to ten in your head. Tony was the one to look over first, to catch Steve’s eye and give him a half-smile._ _

__Steve smiled back. “Pretty good streak up to then, right?”_ _

__“Not too bad for us,” agreed Tony._ _

__(Us.)_ _

__They walked in silence for two blocks. Steve found himself walking slower at street corners, to linger in the sunshine where the buildings didn’t get in the way. Without mentioning it, Tony matched his pace, didn’t try to jaywalk when the crosswalk lights were against them._ _

__Steve wasn’t sure how long they were supposed to be on a break from talking. He paged through possible topics in his head. Pepper. No. The suit. Already done. SI. Couldn’t count on it not to piss Tony off. Sam. No._ _

__Tony said, “I fucking love this city.”_ _

__Steve looked over at him. Tony had his head tilted straight back, craning up at the water towers and skyscrapers, his lips parted. Somehow it tugged at Steve’s heart to see him that way. It was so rare for Tony to mean only and exactly what he said._ _

__“It’s home.”_ _

__“No. I don’t do that,” Tony said with utter finality._ _

__“I—okay.” Steve kicked at a stray nail on the sidewalk, thought better of it, and bent to pick it up._ _

__“Gimme,” ordered Tony._ _

__“The—what, the nail? What for?”_ _

__“Upcycling.”_ _

__Steve filed the word away to look up later. He gave the nail to Tony, and Tony put it in his pocket._ _

__“Making a thing for Clint,” Tony explained. “Repurposed found metal, he’ll hate it, he hates that hipster shit. People recognize me but they don’t act like assholes about it. In Malibu people want to talk to you about pacifism in the elevator. Can’t get anything done.”_ _

__After a bewildered second, Steve got that they were circling back to New York. “I take pictures with a lot of kids,” he admitted._ _

__“And dogs.”_ _

__“And dogs, yeah. Well, I like dogs.”_ _

__“Dit dit dit,” said Tony. “This just in. Earth’s mightiest hero, savior of the city of New York Steve Rogers, likes dogs more than kids.”_ _

__Steve grinned. “You’re such a jerk. I like kids too. I don’t want to say the wrong thing. Dogs can’t talk. Kids remember stuff.”_ _

__“Pffft,” went Tony. “I barely remember anything before I was—when was MIT?—fourteen? I wouldn’t worry about it. I’m pretty sure you haven’t been etching indelibly traumatic memories into every kid you’ve said cheese next to.”_ _

__Not every kid. Any kid. Maybe Steve didn’t remember every single grown-up who’d called him a sissy growing up, but he remembered enough of them. They hadn’t been malicious, either. He felt tired, and he didn’t know how to say any of this to Tony without sound melodramatic or argumentative or self-important. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said instead._ _

__Tony veered slightly sideways, to bump Steve’s shoulder. Taken aback, Steve glanced over at him to see what he wanted, but Tony resumed his former trajectory as if nothing had happened. They split to overtake a skinny couple making out passionately in the middle of the sidewalk, then came back together on the other side._ _

__Because Tony wasn’t asking, Steve said, “I kinda thought I’d be done by now, is all.”_ _

__Tony’s head turned up toward him, brown eyes sharp. “You know, Cap, I’ve got a pretty good therapist on tap—well, Pepper does—if you ever—”_ _

__“I don’t mean dead.” Steve was touched. People didn’t, mostly, worry about him. Mostly, he was the one doing the worrying._ _

__“Cause it sounded like you meant dead.”_ _

__“Well, I didn’t. I meant, I’m tired.” He felt guilty even admitting it._ _

__“Tired.” At first Steve thought Tony was going to argue, but he said, “I get that. Even when we’re not saving the world, we might be in fifteen minutes.”_ _

__“Yeah!” said Steve._ _

__“Yeah.” Tony checked his phone. “Still good for now. Want to get a milkshake?”_ _

__Steve said “Yes!” and almost, but not quite, said “Wherever you want to go,” and then it occurred to him that, surprisingly, “wherever you want to go” would have been true just then even if where Tony wanted to go was the moon._ _

__More surprising was the way it didn’t feel new. It felt regular, natural, like closing his eyes when he was tired or looking east when the sun was coming up. A feeling he had had before, and not thought about, the way he didn’t let himself think about sleep when he didn’t have time to sleep, or the sun when a mission took him somewhere relentlessly rainy._ _

__Was he doing a weird thing with his elbows? Steve felt like his arms were moving in an unnatural way, and he couldn’t remember the regular way he moved his elbows when he was walking. He tried making them be stiff at his sides, but that turned out to be much weirder. To keep Tony from noticing, he said, “It’s close by?”_ _

__“The, what, the milkshake place? Yeah. You okay, Cap?”_ _

__“Yes,” Steve said, too loudly._ _

__What an idiotic desire to have: to be in the place where Tony Stark was. When Tony would always be gone in the next minute. When he might not even like Steve in the first place._ _

__“Are you seriously good?” Tony asked, careful._ _

__“Yes. Yup. Mm-hm.”_ _

__“Because if I said something to piss you off—”_ _

__“Nope,” said Steve._ _

__“I think we’re compiling a solid body of evidence that suggests I can’t read your mind so if you’re waiting for that—”_ _

__“I said I’m—”_ _

__“You. Are being. So weird right now,” Tony proclaimed, stentorian on each syllable._ _

__(Not a rousing success, the elbows weirdness avoidance campaign.)_ _

__“I’m thinking about what kind of ice cream I want,” Steve said. “Quit peer-pressuring me.”_ _

__To his delight, Tony burst out laughing, his head back, his white teeth showing. “Who taught you that!”_ _

__“Youths,” said Steve._ _

__Tony laughed even harder, and he was still giggling when they reached the ice cream truck. Actually it was a milkshake truck, because the twenty-first century was nothing if not specialized._ _

__“Evening, Mr. Stark,” said the milkshake truck woman. Steve liked people who said “evening” when it was still really afternoon._ _

__“Evening, Patricia,” said Tony._ _

__“The usual?”_ _

__“Yep, and whatever my friend wants.” Tony waved a hand at Steve._ _

__“I’ll get mine,” said Steve, and he added quickly, so it wouldn’t sting but it also wouldn’t seem like he might otherwise expect Tony to pay for him, “I’m still deciding.”_ _

__For a second, he thought Tony was going to explode. (Again.) But he didn’t. He didn’t say anything. He nodded and took a five out of his wallet and handed it to Patricia. It was fine, except that he wasn’t laughing anymore, not his mouth and not his eyes. It was better than fine, progress even, for him not to be mad._ _

__It was fine, except that Tony drank his milkshake so fast it should have given him brain freeze, and then he threw the cup in a nearby trash can, hailed a cab, and didn’t talk to Steve the whole drive home. It was fine, except that when they reached the tower, Tony swung himself out of the car fast and graceful, and he leaned his head back down and said, “You got this, right?”_ _

___I’m sorry,_ Steve thought (sorry for _what?_ ), but what he said was, “Yeah, I got it.”_ _


	4. A Wing-Collared Shirt and a Tailcoat

“I never said it was a date anyway,” Tony said to one of his screens.

He wasn’t young enough or dumb enough to think life was ever fair, but it was particularly unfair for fucking Steve to make him feel awkward about trying to pay for a _goddamn milkshake_ when nobody had thought the word _date_ in the first place until Steve got all squirrelly about it.

A milkshake cost four dollars. Six if Steve got fancy toppings on it, which he hadn’t and wouldn’t because Oreo bits in chocolate ice cream were apparently too decadent for a kid from Brooklyn. Even Clint, who was terrible with money, had enough to treat a person to a milkshake.

Sometimes, some days, Tony wanted to take Steve’s pioneer boy deprivation self-restraint bullshit and beat him to death with it. What would be a good murder weapon that really said _America?_ Flagpole. Baseball bat. Could you in any way weaponize apple pie (poison, obviously, but that was boring and long distance; not satisfying).

Trained bald eagle. Talons and beak.

Eh. Steve would probably look it sternly in the eye and turn it docile as a pussycat. It’d be waking him up in the morning with squawky eagle songs and helping him get dressed, and wow was it not a good idea to think about Steve Rogers sleepy and shirtless.

Not. That. He. Cared.

He was in a bad mood because of the benefit, and the benefit would be over in two days, and then he could devote all his attention to making new toys for the team. As long as nobody attacked the country, he didn’t have to worry about Steve at all, unless he wanted to, and he didn’t want to. If he was terrible at Steve, he could at least be good at toys. He’d run some specs on Steve’s suit, and it was about as armory as it could be, which meant it could be a lot _lot_ more weapony. Boots. Steve’s boots were from the fucking Iron Age. Tony could easily halve the weight of the actual boots by swapping the reinforced leather for a lighter, sturdier polymer, and then he could add—

“Miss Potts on the line for you,” said Jarvis.

“No,” said Tony.

No no no no no no.

“You gave her an override, sir,” Jarvis reminded him.

“No I didn’t.” (He did.)

Pepper’s face came up on his main screen. She looked sorrowful and gorgeous, and Tony knew what she was going to say before she said it. “I can’t make to the gala tomorrow.”

“Bullshit,” Tony said.

“The Wakandan ambassador wants to meet to talk about the Comoros, and that’s the only day she’s free. I’m sorry. I know I said I could be there with you.”

“Then I’m not going.”

Pepper didn’t answer right away. Smart girl, that Pepper Potts, apart from—naturally—the year she’d spent dating him. Chalk it up to the perils of proximity.

“You can’t make me,” he added.

“I can probably,” said Pepper. “I run everything you own and everybody knows it, so your bodyguards would listen to me over you if I told them to. I know you don’t want to go.”

“Don’t want to go and am not going.”

“I know I said I’d be there—”

“Promised you’d be there.”

“I know. I’m sorry. But I need—the company still needs you to go. _You_ still need you to go. The _Daily Mail’_ s been running that picture of you at the funeral. You know how it’s going to look if you’re not there.”

Tony popped his left thumb out of joint and back in again. He knew all that. The counterarguments. He actually agreed with all of them, and he had before she ever brought it up to him. It was just that— “I’m not a good enough liar.”

If Pepper had been there, she’d have known. But she was in California, and he was in New York, and his back was to her. She said, “Yes you are.”

Yes he was. “Reschedule the meeting.”

“Reschedule the meeting.”

“Yes.”

“With the Wakandan ambassador.”

“Yes.”

“On the one night she’s—”

“What? Free? Doesn’t matter if she’s free, you’re not free. We’re going to this benefit memorial gala bullshit. I bought your ticket. I paid for your seat.”

Pepper said, “I know you know why this is important, Tony. Do we need to go through it again?” When Tony didn’t answer, she said, “Okay, we’ll go through it. If you do not go to the benefit after you said you’d go, the tabloids are going to run that funeral picture a hundred more times. They’re going to say, _Rumors that Obadiah Stane broke with Tony Stark before his death_ —”

“Maybe I don’t care.”

“Okay,” said Pepper. “Well, you can decide you don’t care. If that’s what you want, that’s what we’ll do. It’s going to be a lot of damage control, probably. The story with Obadiah’s not going to be that hard to uncover once people start really looking for it. The stock will go down a little—”

“Go down a lot.”

“—and we’re going to probably have to renegotiate a few business relationships that came to us through Obadiah, including—”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah you’ll go?”

“Yeah,” said Tony. “I’ll go.”

“Can you look at me before you hang up, please?” Pepper said.

Tony spun on his heel and gave Pepper his best _Anthony Edward Stark, scion of billionaires_ smile. She made a face. “Take someone from the team,” she said. “I mean it. I don’t want you going to this on your own.”

“Yes, Mom.”

**

He asked Natasha first. She was good at galas. She owned gowns.

“Benefit for what?” she said.

“Wounded Warriors.” Pepper and Tony had gone ten rounds with the board about where to give the money. Gamblers Anonymous had been considered as a possibility, since Obie’s father had been a gambler, but Tony thought of those kids on that goddamn Humvee and fought grimly for a veterans’ charity.

“Pass,” said Natasha.

“Not it,” said Clint.

“Nobody wants to take you out in public anyway, Barton,” Tony said. “Hey, though, what about your girl?”

“Katie’s not—”

“Sure, sure. Your smarter, hotter, younger replacement who knows how to behave at a white-tie event and is better with a bow than you. Have her come. She supports wounded soldiers, doesn’t she?”

Clint yawned. “You don’t want to take her. She gets in trouble at events like this.”

“Events like what?” said Steve, coming in at the door by the refrigerator. He must have just returned from a run because his shirt was wet and his arms were arms and his—

 _Knock it off, Stark._ “Pep canceled on me for this fancy benefit gala shit tomorrow. Proceeds go to Wounded Warriors. I’m trying to get Natasha to go with me, it’s going to be really fucking boring, and I don’t want to be there by myself.”

Steve was chugging an entire liter-bottle of water. He held up a finger to mean _wait._

“She shot a guy in the _eye_ one time,” Clint said.

“Jesus,” said Tony.

“Right in the eyes.” Clint jabbed two fingers at his own eyes, to illustrate.

“I’ll go with you,” said Steve finally, taking the empty bottle away from his mouth. He wasn’t even out of breath. Supersoldiers.

“Yeah?” He didn’t intend it to come out so—like Steve had just agreed to go with him to prom. But the relief was almost overwhelming. Just to have someone _there,_ even if it wasn’t someone like Pepper who would literally hold his literal hand. Just not to be the only one at the thing who knew that every word about Obie’s heroism and his tragic death and what he would have wanted was a lie.

“Yeah,” said Steve. “Tuxedo okay?”

“Ah, no, it’s white tie. But no worries on that front, I’ll take care of that—”

Natasha made a small, sharp movement.

“—we can get my tailor in, Jesus, thanks for doing this, Steve. Your dress shoes should be fine, but we can get you fitted for—”

“I’d rather wear my tux,” Steve said stiffly.

“Well, no can do, pal, unless you’ve got a dress coat. Take it up with the foundation, they’re the ones who came up with the whole idea. My guy’s good, you’re in safe hands.” When Tony stopped talking, it was because everyone else in the kitchen had gone still.

Steve was standing to attention, like he did when he was nervous. “I’d rather wear my own things.”

“Are you—is he serious?” said Tony, to Nat.

“I extend my pass on the gala to include any conversation about the gala,” Natasha said. “Clint, you want to go eat in the den?”

“Yep,” said Clint.

Considering they were both spies, their exit was distinctly lacking in grace or subtlety. Tony returned his gaze to Steve, already pissed as hell.

“I don’t want you buying me stuff,” Steve said.

Christ, the date thing, again? When Steve had heard him say he wanted Natasha to go with him? “This doesn’t count. An objective panel of observers would agree this doesn’t count. You’re doing me a favor, I’m just— If I wanted you to fly out to Tokyo at a minute’s notice for SI, I wouldn’t expect you to supply the jet. I paid for Pepper’s dress.” He crossed the room to where Steve was standing.

“Pepper,” said Steve, “sleeps with you.”

Tony’s eyebrows went up. “Wow, there, champ. You’re saying if my tailor came and fitted you for a wing-collared shirt and a vest, you’d feel obliged to put out?”

“No,” said Steve. He was blushing.

Captain America was fucking hot when he blushed. It pissed Tony off out of all proportion. “Point of order: Pepper doesn’t sleep with me since we broke up, and I don’t pay for sex. Although if you’re asking me to make an exception—”

“That’s— I didn’t—”

“Yes?” Tony said, canting his hips slightly closer to Steve, crowding him, because Steve brought out the absolute worst in him, and that was not new information.

Voice thready, Steve said, “Knock it off. I meant—”

“Yeah?” said Tony.

“Go by yourself,” said Steve. He nudged Tony aside with embarrassing ease and slipped past him. On his way out, he put his water bottle in the recycling bin.

**

So Tony went by himself.

**

Everything was blurry, and nothing hurt. Tony was getting work done, and he was not thinking about, he was definitely nowhere near thinking about, his dead father and his dead surrogate father and all the things that were his fault. He was getting work done, and he was not listening to Jarvis.

“Captain Rogers,” went Jarvis. He said other things, but that was the thing Tony heard.

“Not now, nope,” said Tony. His fingers slipped, and he lost the blurry screwdriver he had been using. “Dummy,” he said. “Dummy. Flathead. Small one.”

Dummy made a small, sad noise.

“Jesus,” said Steve, and goddamn _Steve,_ how had he gotten in the workshop? A blurry cup of coffee clanked down on his worktable. Tony tried to pick it up, but his fingers were slippery, and the cup fell and broke and splattered, and Steve said, “Tony, your hands.”

“I’m working.”

Steve sighed. Tony was tired of Steve sighing at him. “You need to get patched up, soldier.”

“Ho ho ho,” said Tony. “ _I’_ m not stupid. _I_ know what patched up means. You mean _sobered_ up and no thank you to _that,_ soldier Captain boy. I am getting my best work done and _you_ are the, you know. The, you are, the one opposing the march of—what is it? Dimes. Progress or what have you. This is going to be a fine, a staggering and innovative sort of science that I am doing.”

“Okay,” said Steve. “You’re right. It’s good science.”

“Don’t fucking humor me,” Tony snarled.

“I’m not. I think all your stuff is good. Don’t be mad at me because I don’t always get it.” Steve’s voice sounded sad. Or. Something. Now that Tony had stopped working, everything had become very spinny, which was why it was an awful idea to stop working in the middle.

“You broke my coffee,” said Tony.

“I brought your coffee,” said Steve. “But the cup fell. Tell you what, let’s get you into bed, and then I’ll get you some more coffee. Want to?”

“Irish coffee.”

Steve sighed. Again. He didn’t say _no Irish coffee,_ although he had _no Irish coffee_ written all over his face. He just took one of Tony’s arms and slung it over his shoulder, which meant—because Steve was fucking strong and fucking tall—that Tony found himself being walked toward the door, draped on Steve, without intending any of it. His feet were unsteady, and the blurry room had gotten blurrier and spinnier around him.

“Fuck this is awful,” he said.

Steve nudged a tool kit out of their way with his foot. “I know. Let’s just get you to bed and clean you up a little bit, and you’ll feel better.”

“I feel,” said Tony, “fucking fine.”

They were in the elevator now, and Tony shoved free of Steve to slump against one of the walls. He slid down it and ended up in a manly and purposeful heap on the floor.

Steve sighed.

“No, no,” Tony said, waving a hand. His hands were drippy. “I know what you’re thinking. Did that on purpose. The floor is just more constable. Comfortable. So that’s why.”

The elevator dinged.

“Up and at ’em,” said Steve.

Tony discovered that he had always wanted to spend the night in the elevator, but Steve knelt down next to him, wrapped Tony’s arm around his shoulder again, and heaved him up. Tony wailed in protest. “I decided to _sleep_! This fucking _gala,_ I am _tired_ —”

“I know you are,” said Steve. “I should’ve let you take me to the gala. If you’d said what it— Just stay with me for another few minutes, all right? We’re going to get some electrolytes into you, bandage you up a little bit, and then you can hit the sack. Deal?”

“Electrolytes,” Tony repeated. “Who died and made you a scientist?”

Steve made his stupid puff laugh noise. “Here, look. Bed.”

The bed was comfortable and soft and not Tony’s. “Hey,” he said.

“It’s okay,” said Steve. “This was closer, and I know where the first-aid kit is in my bathroom. Sit tight. I’ll be right back.”

Steve’s bed had very few pillows, and now that he was lying down, Tony discovered he felt much dizzier and sicker than he had previously thought. Also, there was a reason he had been working and not sleeping, and the reason was that when you were sleeping and not working, you had space to think about Obadiah’s face above you when you couldn’t move and he was going to kill Pepper and you were going to die and—

“Okay, we’ve got— Hey. Tony. _Hell._ Tony?”

Hands clutching his. Hurt like a bitch. Tony made a noise he was not proud of.

“Stay with me. Tony. Drat, I’m sorry, that was right on—”

—and it was cold and there was nobody—

Steve’s hands moved. His chest. The arc reactor.

“ _Get the fuck off me,_ ” Tony snarled.

Steve staggered backward, and Tony’s eyes came into something like focus. There was blood on the sheets, and on Steve’s arms in finger-length stripes, and Steve’s blue eyes were very wide. He was holding two clear bottles and a blue tube and some cloths, and he was not Obadiah and nobody was, anymore.

“Oh,” said Tony. Humiliation like a hot, staticky blanket.

“Did you—” Steve put a tentative hand out. “I didn’t mean—are you okay?”

Tony pulled away. “Get out of my fucking room, Rogers.” Of all the fucking people, of all the fucking things for him to—

This was why he got drunk. Drunk was better than this. This plus drunk was the worst of the possible choices, except possibly this plus hungover, which was coming, but anyway the good option was drunk and busy and that was what he had been up to until Steve _fucking Rogers_ —

“It’s my room,” said Steve. “It was closer. Let me just fix your hands, okay? I won’t touch the— I won’t do anything else. But you need someone to—your hands are really— I don’t want you to get an infection.”

Tony hesitated.

“The team needs your hands, Tony.”

“You need my money.” He could hear how nasty that came out.

“Yep,” agreed Steve. “Your money and your hands. How about it?”

Tony settled back against the headboard—it felt better to have something solid at his back—and extended both his hands to Steve. He felt dizzy, and he had to devote several levels of his attention to not throwing up all over Captain America. What an attractive look that would be.

“Quick sting,” Steve said, and there was one, and then there were bandages wrapping, and Steve’s long fingers under his knuckles. “What’d you do?”

“Went to a party.”

“I know. I meant after. What’d you do to your hands?”

Tony yawned. “Science.”

“Another little sting, okay? Can you maybe do science sober from now on? At least be sober when you do science with sharp objects?”

“I make no guarantees.” Tony waved his hand grandly.

“Hey, hey, I’m not done with that. You’ve still got— For Pete’s sake, Tony. Okay.” Steve retrieved the wayward hand, finished wrapping a soft cotton bandage that went up halfway up Tony’s forearm, and pinned it with a safety pin.

(Steve fucking Rogers.)

“Here. Drink this.” A bottle with a colorful label and water inside. “It’s Bruce’s special, whatever he calls it, fancy electrolyte health water.”

“Can I lie down?”

“Water first, then you can lie down. I still need to do your other hand.”

Tony had to choke the water down. If a person needed water so badly when they were drunk, shouldn’t water taste better? But the reward was that he got to lie down, scrunching into clean but scratchy sheets and not nearly enough pillows. “You need more pillows,” he mumbled.

“Yeah? I’ll look into it. One more sting.”

This one really hurt. Tony yelped.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Steve said. “That was deep. Last one though. You can go to sleep in just a minute.”

By the time Steve finished with his left hand, Tony was mostly asleep. There weren’t enough goddamn pillows was the only thing, and Steve’s sheets were for shit, but his hands were gentle, and when he was finishing up and taking away the bottles and bandages and safety pins— _safety pins_ —his fingers brushed against Tony’s cheek, and he said very quietly, or Tony thought he did, “You can rest now, sweetheart,” and the truly fucking surprising thing was that Tony could.

***

When he woke up the next morning, he had—yes, a headache, he deserved the headache. His hands hurt. He couldn’t remember hurting them, just Steve’s face, and blood on the sheets. When he braced on his left hand to sit up, the pain flared up, and he swore.

“Hey,” said Steve. He was leaning against the doorframe in loose trousers and a T-shirt, looking infinitely, unbearably fuckable.

Or not. Not that. It was just that it was the first thing in the morning, and Tony felt shitty and Steve looked like sleep and soft edges and compliance, and he was carrying a mug with the Iron Man helmet on it. “Is that coffee?”

“Yep. Don’t get up. You like it with sugar, right?” He sat on the end of the bed and offered the cup to Tony, who reached out for it. “Nope. Other hand.”

“Bossy,” said Tony. He took the coffee with his right hand.

“Let me have a look at this?” said Steve, and took Tony’s left hand without waiting for permission. Tony sucked in a breath that had nothing to do with how much that hand hurt. “Sorry,” said Steve, abstracted. He was undoing pins and bandages, very gently.

“Hey, no,” said Tony.

Immediately, Steve stopped, holding Tony’s hand palm-up in both of his.

“No, you’re fine, I just meant, shouldn’t we get a doctor to—” Fuck the coffee was terrible.

“Not a bad idea,” Steve agreed, unwrapping. “You tore them up pretty good. I didn’t want you going to bed with open wounds.”

Tony didn’t answer because he was focusing on drinking Steve’s kindly meant but genuinely awful coffee without gagging. Somehow, though, the silence that fell between them felt heavy with meaning.

To break it, he said, “You can go ahead with the bandages. I trust you.”

Steve looked at him through blond eyelashes.

“Um, I mean, your,” Tony said, out of breath suddenly. “Your medical appraisal. As an army—you know. An army person. This coffee’s terrible.”

“Yeah,” said Steve. “I had a sip before I brought it up.”

 _Out of my cup?_ Tony wanted to ask, except that he didn’t want Steve to think he was mad about it (or flirting). “So you are trying to poison me,” he said instead.

“I went out for Starbucks earlier, but it got cold. And then I got— You slept a little later than I thought.” Steve hissed sympathetically as he peeled the last of the bandages away. “I’m going to try to clean some of this blood up, if that’s okay. So we can see what’s what.”

As Steve got up, and Tony tried to bunch up the sheets and blanket using the back of his left hand and the ring and pinkie fingers of his right, he said, “I don’t need your tender ministrations, you know, Rogers.”

Steve poked his head out of the bathroom. “Sorry?” he said, and he was being too nice and his eyes were too blue and his shoulders were too shouldery for the snide remark to be worth repeating.

“I feel bad you’re wasting a morning on this,” Tony said instead.

“Hah,” said Steve. He emerged from the bathroom with a bowl of water and a fresh batch of cloths and bandages. “Well, since I acted like an ass about your benefit, I’d say it’s the least I can do.”

“Language!”

Steve grinned at him and sat down on the edge of the bed. “Okay, ready for this to hurt? I cleaned you up a little bit last night, but you were awful wriggly.”

“Was not.”

“Were so. Do you remember us agreeing you aren’t going to cut sheet metal drunk from now on?”

“Ha,” said Tony. “Nice try. I wasn’t that drunk. You’re going to have to apply a little more of your fabled tactical brilliance if you want to separate a man from his aviation snips.”

Steve dipped a cloth in his bowl, wrung it out, and began tracing careful lines in Tony’s palm, away from the deepest of the cuts. He was as intent on it as if Tony had been a map of the enemy’s position, or an art project. “Hey, wriggle your fingers,” he said.

Tony did. It hurt.

“Good. Didn’t think to check on that last night.”

“What kind of doctor are you,” Tony said. “Ow. Fuck.”

“Sorry,” said Steve. He took the cloth away, rinsed it, and wrung it out again, but he didn’t bring it back. Instead he sat looking down into the bowl of water, pensive.

“Penny for them.”

“I’m, uh—listen. I should have gone with you. I didn’t realize it was for Obadiah, the benefit. I know he—well, I know he’s the reason you—” He gestured at the arc reactor. “I know you wouldn’t have that, if it wasn’t for him. And you shouldn’t have had to spell it out for me. You’re a member of my team, and you asked me to help out, and I let my— I didn’t have my head right.”

He glanced at Tony, his cheeks turning pink.

“I just wanted to say that,” he said.

Tony tried not to look as stunned as he felt. “Thanks.”

“Yeah. Won’t happen again.” Steve picked up Tony’s hand again and surveyed it, tilting it gently sideways. “Not too bad,” he said. “I’ll put some cream on it and wrap it back up for you. Good as new in a few days.”

The cream was fucking magic, or Steve’s fingers were. Tony had to stop himself from putting his head back and moaning. To forestall anything of that nature, he said, “Sorry I—I know I was rough with you last night, when, uh. The arc reactor is a sensitive—”

“I responded poorly,” Steve said crisply. “You were justified.”

“It’s just,” Tony said. “The night Obadiah died, he, ah, he took it out. Of. You know. Me.”

He clenched his jaw to stop his teeth from chattering. It was stupid. That had been years ago, and Obadiah was dead, and if there was a reason he’d never talked about it to anyone but Pepper, the reason was that it didn’t matter because they had won.

Steve swallowed, his fingers tightening around Tony’s wrist. “He— What?”

“He paralyzed me with a weapon I’d designed, karma’s a bitch, and then when I was—when I couldn’t move, he just—yeah, pulled the arc reactor out of my chest. It’s inconsequential, you know, in the long run it doesn’t matter, but if you’re wondering why you got— Ah, why I was a little—”

“It’s not fucking inconsequential,” Steve said. His voice was uneven, though his hands, wrapping bandages back over Tony’s palm, remained steady.

Tony didn’t know how to answer that. It wasn’t even the swearing, although the swearing was pretty monumental. It was the anger behind it, the force of it. And Steve was still pinning a bandage and flexing Tony’s fingers open and shut, carefully, tenderly.

Not _tenderly._ Just.

Tony took his hand back. He was going to say something stupid, if Steve kept touching him this way, like a thing to be valued.

Deprived of the task in front of him, Steve abruptly looked lost and hurt and just really fucking young. He caught Tony’s eyes, and before Tony could say whatever stupid, shitty thing he was going to come out with, Steve said, “You know that couldn’t happen again. What happened with Obadiah.”

“Yeah. Pep and I killed him.”

“I meant someone coming into your home and hurting you,” Steve said. “The team wouldn’t let that happen, we never would.”

Tony looked down and away. “No, I know.”

With the knuckles of his first two fingers, Steve nudged Tony’s chin up. “Hey. I mean it. Someone tried to hurt you, I’d take ’em apart.”

If there had been any softness in Steve’s voice, Tony would have said something sarcastic. But he was just matter-of-fact. Soldierly. He was the leader of the Avengers, and team safety was a tactical priority.

That he had touched Tony’s face (again?), that his eyes were huge and intent, those things were irrelevant.

Tony let out a breath, careful to keep it steady. “I’ll,” he said. “I’ll, uh. I’ll get out of your bed in just a minute.”

There was an element of bluff to this. At the moment, Tony was clenching his left hand tightly in the covers at his hips, thinking about equations and grandmothers, and still not quite in a fit state to be up and about.

“No rush,” said Steve.

Tony smiled, and Steve smiled back. Expectantly.

 _Not expectantly, Stark. Don’t be a dirty old man._ “You got it,” Tony said. “Ten more minutes in bed with this awful coffee, and I’ll be back up to punching my weight. Thanks, Rogers.”

Something flickered in Steve’s eyes. “Sure. Yep. Okay. Take care.” He marched out of the room with a soldier’s briskness, and then came rushing back in straight away, to collect his creams and bandages and safety pins. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Sorry. Get some rest. Sorry.”

Tony lay down, running his bandaged right thumb over the palm of his bandaged left hand, testing to see how hard he could press before it hurt. He did not think about Steve’s shoulders. His knuckles, brushing (had they?) across Tony’s cheek the night before.

It wasn’t personal. It was business. Avengers business. His job.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yes, that was a reference to The Raven King, you're welcome


	5. Linen Sheets

Tony knocked on Steve’s doorframe the next morning, when Steve was playing with the tiny computer Tony had given him that you were supposed to call a tablet. “Hey,” Tony said. He didn’t come in, but leaned against the doorframe, fiddling with the bandages on his hands.

“Tony!” Somehow he hadn’t expected Tony to want to be around him, after— Not that anything had happened. Steve wasn’t happy with the way they left things was all. Somehow it had felt unresolved and, just, not quite right.

“Working hard, or hardly working?” said Tony.

Steve chuckled.

Tony blinked. “I—honestly can’t tell if you’re joking or not?”

“Not?” said Steve. “That was—you’re funny. I thought it was a joke.”

“Ah. Sure. It’s an old saw. If you’d lived through any of the decades you missed out while you were in the ice, you’d’ve heard it already. What are you working on?”

Steve patted the bed. “Just reviewing game tape.”

“Game tape,” Tony repeated, smiling a little. He unleaned himself from the door frame, and there was something wrapped up in white paper and blue ribbon behind him, which Steve was going to have to deal with in a minute. But Tony flopped himself down on the bed beside Steve, and Steve was sufficiently pleased with what he was doing on his little computer to consider it worth postponing the fight with Tony.

“From the London thing,” Steve explained, tilting the computer down so Tony could see. “The terror birds. I asked Jarvis, and he said he could pull the CCTV footage. Thought it could be useful to have a look, see what the team looks like from a couple different angles.”

Tony looked up at Steve. “Smart,” he said. Steve felt his ears heat up. _Smart,_ from Tony Stark, was no idle thing. While Steve was recovering from this, Tony went on, “See any tech adjustments I could make?”

“No,” Steve said, surprised that it was even a question.

“Like you’d know, grandpa.”

Steve chuckled. “Not my area.”

“So what are you looking for?” Tony asked.

“Team stuff,” said Steve. “I don’t have much basis for comparison, but I’ve been wondering if Nat’s spending too much time worrying about Clint. Since, ah, New York, and even more so since Hydra, I thought.”

“See,” said Tony. “That’s why you’re in charge of this team, and I just make us shiny toys. And?”

That was so typical of Tony. Half the time you couldn’t get him to shut up about what a genius he was, and the other half he acted like his work—the things that kept them all alive—was a joke.

“Here,” said Steve. He thumbed through a few video options before pressing play on one. “This is a good camera angle. I’ve been, well, Jarvis has been, synching them up with the sound recordings Jarvis makes from your suit. This is right after you dropped me on the biggest one?”

“Damn,” Tony said, pausing the video and zooming in on a grainy Nat.

_Okay, Widow,_ said the audio version of Captain America, _we’ve got the civilians clear. Get to the source and bring him in,_ and you could see the screen Natasha hesitate and look back for Clint.

“And here’s Clint,” Steve said, switching to a different video, “at that same time stamp.” He was in Nat’s line of sight, but not in any particular danger, taking down the smaller birds from the street level. The terror birds had been, well, terrifying, as you would expect from cloned carnivores; but they weren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, and they didn’t connect the sudden deaths of their mates with the tiny human way down on the ground.

“And again here,” said Steve.

The second time, there was more justification for it: one of those big birds had landed and just missed kicking Clint into a building, and Nat hesitated when she was supposed to be heading for the building that housed the British lunatic who’d made them. It was nothing Clint couldn’t handle, and nothing remotely like mind-control.

“Huh,” Tony said. “Well, good call.”

Steve set the tablet down and rubbed his eyes. “You don’t have to sound so surprised. I do keep an eye on the team.”

“No, I know. Would—should we bring it up to Nat?”

_We_ felt good. The Avengers were a hell of a team, but none of them wanted to be leader, and although Steve didn’t want, particularly, to be the leader either, here he was in charge. They wanted him to make the decisions. They didn’t want to carry that burden, and Steve didn’t blame them. It was just that sometimes he didn’t want to do it either.

At least, not by himself. “You want to?” he said.

Tony tipped his head down and laughed into the comforter. “Hell no. I don’t want to get hit. If you want to take one for the team, be my guest, but I’d rather make the adjustment to how we call the shots. Get Clint to talk a little more.”

“If you’re using yourself as a comparison—” Steve teased.

“Hilarious. You’re a captain and a comedian. Get Clint to talk a little more on the comms, and if you could just give updates a little more often about who has eyes on the, ah, the more, well, Steve, and I hope you’ll never report this back to the team, but the more susceptible members. You and me and Thor are a hair more indestructible than Clint and Nat and Sam.”

He hesitated, just slightly, before saying Sam’s name.

Steve sighed. In his opinion, Tony could stand to take fewer risks in the field, but he knew that Tony would snap at him, if he said that. Tony did snap at him when he did say it. And this was nice, this, here, this companionable talk about strategy. It felt easy, and things with Tony were rarely easy.

“Don’t get modest on me, pumpkin,” Tony said.

“No, you’re right.”

Tony blinked.

“What?” said Steve. “Even a broken clock is right twice a day.”

“Shitdamn, Cap, they put something in your coffee? You are _punchy_ today.” He looked up at Steve, with his eyebrows pulled down and his eyes and mouth laughing.

Desire caught Steve at an unexpected angle. He wanted to slide his hips down the bed, so that his face was at a level with Tony’s. He wanted to pull him close, tangle their legs together—

“Hey,” said Tony. His voice sounded far away.

“Hey,” Steve said, automatically.

When he was able to bring his mind back to reality, Tony had put the tablet aside and was watching him. He said, “Still with me?”

“I,” said Steve. _Eyes up,_ he ordered himself, but he wasn’t under his own control anymore, and his eyes kept flicking down to Tony’s mouth. “Come here,” he said.

For once, for goddamn once, Tony didn’t have any smart-mouthed thing to say to that. If he had, Steve couldn’t have kept going. But Tony just slithered up so that he was kneeling beside Steve, his hands folded in his lap, and his face said, _So what now?_

“I wanted to kiss you?” Steve said, very softly, as if saying it quietly would maintain deniability if, when, if, when Tony laughed in his face.

Tony didn’t laugh.

Tony caught his breath, and Steve shivered.

Tony said, “Okay,” not said but breathed, not breathed but mouthed, no voice to it, no sound, just the shape of the word on his lips.

Steve bit his bottom lip, and Tony was smiling a smile Steve had never seen before, a smile that if it was not itself shy was at least informed by the idea of shyness. _Sweetheart,_ thought Steve, which he couldn’t quite say; and he took Tony’s face in his hands and kissed him. 

_Finally,_ he thought, as if he’d been thinking about this all along, as if it had been in his head since they met on the helicarrier. Tony kissed like Steve was water. And he tasted like coffee, and. And he licked into him and arched his back to make Steve hold him tighter, and. And the way he swore, the puff of the hard K of _fuck_ in Steve’s mouth, and, and, and, and.

Tony’s mouth went away, and Steve made an embarrassing, needy, scraping noise. But he was only shifting, kissing the line of Steve’s jaw, sucking at a place on his neck that made Steve dig his fingers in—too hard, _be careful_ —into Tony’s shoulders. “Tell me what you want,” Tony said. “Tell me what you want me to do to you.”

Steve moaned. “I,” he said. “Don’t stop.”

“Oh,” said Tony, with a small laugh. “I’m not going to fucking stop, Captain Rogers. I’m going to take you the fuck apart, you’re going to fucking _beg_ me.”

_God._

His hands, and—

Steve rolled them over because he could, because he was stronger and he wanted Tony under him, Tony’s hands pulling him down and his head tilted up for Steve to kiss him more, again, forever. He lifted his head because he wanted to see Tony’s face, and Tony smiled up at him, open and fond. It drew something taut in Steve’s heart, the sweetness of it.

He rolled off of Tony and sat up, catching his breath, his back to the headboard. “Wait. Wait wait wait. I need to think.”

Tony twisted fast to a seated position, tucking his legs underneath him and wrapping his arms defensively around himself. Steve could see his face taking on the shape of his repulsor voice, which—surprisingly enough—turned out to mean not contempt but hurt feelings.

“No,” Steve said quickly. “Not what you’re thinking. Tony. Look. I’m—I don’t want to— I like to game things out. And I don’t want to, this—”

“No one’s making you, _this,_ ” Tony hissed. “You kissed _me._ Jesus Christ, I feel like I’m in fucking college again, you closeted queer boys are more than I can goddamn _take_ in my old age.”

Steve grinned, and Tony’s eyes softened, and Steve kissed him again because he wanted Tony’s eyes to look that way more often. Where Tony looked out of them, properly, without the distrustful filters. “You smell good,” he said, breaking the kiss.

“You—”

“I don’t want to do something because you smell good,” Steve said, working it out, carefully, as he spoke. “You smell good and I want to kiss you and, and it’s not— I don’t want to decide something because it feels good right now. I want to decide because it’s the right thing to do and it’s what we both want.”

“Okay,” Tony said blankly.

Steve wished Tony would cooperate a little more. He had no idea if Tony wanted, if Tony would even be interested in—if they were anywhere near being on the same page. It was scary to only know his own mind, and to want something, someone, so badly. _I want you to choose me back._

“Earth to Rogers.”

“Yeah,” said Steve, still thinking.

Tony shook his head, energetically, like a wet dog. “Hey. Look. Don’t be embarrassed. We’ll pretend it didn’t happen. Proximity’s a bitch, life-and-death situations, teammates coming on to each other, it’s—hey. Water under the bridge, okay?”

Steve’s heart sank. “Is that what you want?”

“You just said you—” Tony dropped his face into his hands. “I have no fucking clue what you want from me.”

“Um,” said Steve. Everything. Everything? He wanted to tell Tony _you are smarter than this, it is so obvious what I want, are you screwing with me?_ but then Tony’s face would harden again, and Steve had started this. “I would like to take you out. On. You know. Dates.”

He thought Tony would laugh in his face, or call him old-fashioned, or try to distract him by kissing him some more. But Tony just sat there, staring at Steve as if he were a knotty problem that Tony was determined to unravel.

The silence stretched on so long that Steve thought he was going to have to say, _Never mind! I don’t care!_ Which would have been a lie, and Steve didn’t like lying, but he also didn’t like not knowing where he stood, and not knowing where he stood with Tony in particular.

Finally Tony said, “Dates.”

“Um. Yes?”

“But you don’t,” said Tony. “Like me.”

“Yes I do.”

“Steve.”

It was stupid, it was so stupid, but hearing his name in Tony’s mouth made him shiver. Tony noticed, because he noticed everything, and Steve saw an answering flare of arousal in his eyes. “Stop that,” Steve said, jokingly stern.

“I have no motive for stopping that. You’re the one who said stop, and I’m still not clear on why.”

“I told you,” said Steve.

“Yeah but I didn’t believe you.” Tony’s mouth quirked upward, and Steve couldn’t help smiling back.

“Come here,” said Steve, patting the bed next to him. “You’re too far away.”

“You’re so—”

Tony didn’t say what Steve was _so,_ which was probably a step in the right direction for them. He scootched upward on the bed, his back against the wall, knees drawn slightly up. Steve felt unbearably fond of him. He kicked the blankets so that they wafted upward, and resettled them on top of Tony’s knees and thighs.

Tony smiled downward, not at Steve, only at himself, a secret smile where Steve was the secret.

He liked it. More than he should, probably. More than it was safe to like it.

He put his arm around Tony’s shoulders, and Tony let him. Without Steve’s longer legs in the mix, Tony had to slide a little down the bed to rest his head on Steve’s shoulder.

Sitting like this, they matched up their breathing without intending to. In, out. Tony’s eyes were shut, and he looked shockingly innocent and human without the bright, gamin cynicism that usually lit his face. Cautious, afraid that Tony would stop him, Steve ran the thumb of his free hand up Tony’s jawline, across his temple, back into his hair, over his skull.

_This is where he keeps it. All of that._

Was _awed_ a thing you were supposed to feel? Good sign, or bad? Steve felt unprepared for it. For relationships, altogether, but in particular for this exact person, Tony Stark, cuddled up against his side: touchable skin and soft hair; all spikes and fury and brilliance within.

Steve let his fingers rest at the curve of Tony’s shoulder, and Tony’s hand came up to grip his wrist.

“Don’t hurt your hand,” Steve murmured, turning his head to say the words softly into Tony’s ear. He was elated at the intimacy of the gesture, at being permitted so close that his breath ruffled the strands of Tony’s hair.

“I’m being careful,” said Tony. “I think I’ve bled on enough of your things.”

Steve could feel the shift in him, the tension back in his muscles, even before he said, with studied nonchalance, “Speaking of sheets.”

“Don’t,” Steve said.

They shared a breath in silence. In, out.

“Is it the money?” said Tony quietly enough that it hurt because quiet was not Tony Stark’s métier.

Steve said, vehemently, “ _No._ ”

“Then—”

“It’s.” Now that Tony was asking, and maybe would listen, Steve didn’t know how to answer.

“Because the money’s—I can’t not have it, you know, it’s, I know it’s fucking, this business, the company, it’s been fucking poison since before I was even—but I’m, you have to know I’m trying to—”

“It’s not the money.” Steve angled his head down and sideways, to make Tony meet his eyes. “Hey. It’s not the money. Stop doing that.”

Tony’s thumb tap-tap-tapped against Steve’s leg, distractingly. “I don’t know what it is, then. I fucked up your sheets so I want to buy you some new sheets. That seems—”

“I’ve gotten pretty good at getting blood out of things,” Steve said, trying for a laugh.

Tony didn’t laugh. His thumb kept tapping.

“Can you give me a second? I, I know what it is, but I just, I want to think how to say it right so I won’t make you feel crummy, the way I say it.”

“Jesus,” muttered Tony.

“What.” Steve could hear himself failing at not sounding defensive.

“You’re so—you can’t sit there being all sweet and considerate and you and not expect me—” Tony turned his head and licked a wet stripe up Steve’s neck. His fingers, on Steve’s leg, stopped tapping and slid upward, slow, teasing. Steve shuddered all over, and Tony whispered, “Fucking kiss me then,” and Steve angled his head backward and did.

The corners of Tony’s lips curved up as he licked, tantalizing, into Steve’s mouth; but when Steve kissed him harder, feeling an edge of desperation curl in his stomach, Tony pulled back, made everything lighter. The kiss. The press of his fingers at the nape of Steve’s neck. The weight of him against Steve’s chest.

Steve broke the kiss so he could look at Tony’s eyes, greeny brown and soft (for him, for him, for Steve), and he said, “Hey.”

“I am being,” said Tony, “very very good indeed.” He ran his tongue, lightly, lightly, over the outline of Steve’s ear, and Steve sucked in a sharp breath. “Which is not the same,” whispered Tony into his ear, “just so you know, as being very very good _to you._ I have some ideas about that for later. If. You know. If you want.”

“God,” Steve gasped. His voice was uneven, raggedy. He was hard, and Tony would, Tony would, Tony—

Tony tugged away. “Change your mind?” he said. “The smelling good thing? Cause you smell really honestly fucking incredible, to a degree that I’m legitimately concerned for my sanity.”

“You.” Steve didn’t trust his voice to continue. Not to say something irreparably idiotic and mushy and serious, because Tony Stark, _Tony Stark_ was this close and wanted him. This close, and wanted him, and still had remembered for both of them that Steve wanted to go slow.

Tony leaned his head back against the headboard, smiling to himself. “It should not be overstated how great this is for my ego.”

“What?” Steve managed.

“You, all—” He covered his mouth with one hand, the smile there. “All rumpled and nonverbal, and I’m barely even trying right now. Not to oversell or anything.”

“Nonverbal,” said Steve. “I’m not. I. I’m. I’m regrouping. To.”

It was hard to regroup, with Tony right there and he was letting Steve touch him, and he would let Steve—

“I want it to be equal between us,” Steve blurted out.

Tony cocked his head. “Okay?”

“The money.”

“Yeah,” said Tony, a small, bitter laugh of a word. “I got that. So if I bought you a milkshake, we wouldn’t be equals.”

“If you—” Steve tried to recapture it in his mind, what had felt so clear before Tony started touching him. “If you think you can— You don’t talk to me.”

“Yes I—”

“No, this is what it is. I’ve got it now.”

“If it’s that hard to remember what your point was, Rogers, are you definitely sure you really have a point to make?” Steve flinched, and Tony laughed a sickly kind of laugh, swiping a hand across his face. “Fuck, fuck, don’t make that face. I take it back. Fuck. Tell me. I don’t talk to you.”

“You don’t talk to me, and you just—throw stuff at me instead. Instead of talking to me about, about whatever it is. Like, if _I_ want you to do something, or feel some way, I have to talk to you about it, and— Like.” Steve discovered that he didn’t have any example stories to use that wouldn’t sound like he was dragging up old grudges. “Like, if, if—”

“What.” Tony sounded so wary, and Steve hated it.

“Like now,” he said, on an inspiration. “You’re thinking that I don’t like you or, or whatever you’re thinking. Whatever bad thing you’re thinking about me, or you, or what I think about you. I can’t— I can’t make you unthink that. I can see you’re upset, but I can’t, I, all I can do is tell you that I’m crazy about you, and hope you believe me. You know?”

As he had hoped, it gentled Tony (a very little) to hear him say this. His back relaxed slightly, so that one of his shoulders bumped Steve’s again. Steve nudged back.

“So?” said Tony, finally.

“So, when you— When I’m the one, and you throw expensive stuff at me, it feels like you think I’m so stupid, or so, I don’t know, that there’s this easy solution to me, to buy me some books or some piece of art, or whatever, because it’s not worth your time to—” Unexpectedly, _not worth your time_ caught at his throat.

Tony turned his face into Steve’s shoulder, his breath tickling Steve’s skin. “Stop that, dummy. Of course you’re fucking worth my fucking time, you stupid fuck. Jesus. I’m going to catch feelings if you keep this up.”

“HA!” said Steve, so loudly that Tony jumped a little. “ _That’s_ what I wanted to say. I have feelings for you. I knew you guys had a phrase for it now. I have feelings for you. So that’s why I don’t want to, um, have, um.”

“Sex,” Tony prompted.

Steve could feel Tony’s smile against his collarbone, which was pretty much the best thing he had ever felt apart for every other time Tony had ever touched him. “Sex,” he agreed, “with you right away. And have that be all it is. I have _feelings_ for you.”

Tony pulled away, giggling, and Steve couldn’t help smiling back even though he knew Tony was laughing at him. “Okay,” said Tony.

“Okay to what part?”

“All the parts. Okay I get your stupid Captain America reason for not taking my lovely thoughtful gifts, and okay I want to go on a date with you.”

Steve said, daringly, “Today?”

“No, I’ve got—Shit, what time is it?” Tony said, catapulting himself backwards towards the door.

“It’s—” Steve checked his watch. “Ten-oh-six.”

“I am thirty-six minutes late,” Tony said, “and Jarvis didn’t tell me, and you are fucking adorable with your stupid wristwatch.”

_Stay,_ Steve wanted to say. He said, “Okay. That’s okay. Go work. I know you have to.”

“Don’t change your mind,” said Tony, most of the way out the door, because he was always half in and out of rooms and that was why it meant something when he held still, “while I’m gone.”

Steve didn’t.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [TERROR BIRDS WERE A REAL THING](http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150727-the-reign-of-the-terror-birds)


	6. The Clocks (after all)

Of course, because Tony badly wanted it not to, everything went to shit the next day. Someone leaked the footage of Hydra’s weapons in the Comoros, and the Wakandan ambassador called Steve to ask, coldly, who exactly had access to that video footage and what the Avengers were planning to do with it in the long term. One of Pepper’s college friends, because Pepper had a life outside of Tony and SI and it was important to be respectful of that, was going through a divorce and needed Pepper to come babysit her. The Xavier Institute or whatever they were calling it now had asked Steve to come speak at graduation, and Steve hated public speaking but was too polite to say no.

Saving the world wasn’t so bad, but Tony was pretty sure the meetings would end up killing him.

The first time Steve touched him casually, it made Tony jump. He was pouring his coffee two days after Steve had kissed him (Steve had kissed him, Steve had kissed him), and Steve came up behind him completely silently and scratched his fingers through the short hair at the base of Tony’s neck. Tony yelled “Fuck!” and jolted forward so hard he spilled the whole cup of coffee.

Steve stepped backward fast. “I’m sorry. I thought—I’m sorry. I haven’t seen you, so—Here.” He shoved two kitchen rags over Tony’s shoulder and backed away farther while Tony scrubbed at the spilled coffee.

His shirt was ruined, which meant he had to change, which meant he’d be late for his meeting, which meant Pepper would be mad at him when she got back and it would look like he couldn’t be competent without her and was sabotaging her on purpose to stop her from ever taking vacation again. None of that was Steve’s fault, but Tony still hadn’t had any coffee and he was shit at mornings. He took a breath, and then another, and turned around.

“I’m sorry,” Steve said again, very small. His cheeks were bright red, and his hands were behind him on the kitchen island, like a little kid in a glassware store.

“That’s—it doesn’t matter. You startled me.” Tony reached out and laid a hand on Steve’s chest. His heartbeat was fast, and getting faster. “You okay?”

“I’m _embarrassed._ ” Steve ducked his head, but he covered Tony’s hand with his and said, again, “I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have assumed it was just okay to— We haven’t even—”

Tony leaned up and kissed him, hard. When he leaned away again, Steve was smiling. Mission most excellently accomplished.

“Now your shirt’s all covered in coffee too so we’re square,” said Tony. “I have to go. Meetings. SI shit. Are we still going on a date?”

“Yes,” said Steve, and Tony tried not to look like he had worried that the answer might be no.

“Has to be after Pep gets back,” Tony said.

“I know. It’s okay.” Steve laced his fingers through Tony’s and looked thoughtfully at their joined hands; then he shook them loose. “Yeah. Go. Sorry. I miss you.”

Tony had probably done more difficult things than sit attentively through an SI meeting with Steve Rogers’s voice echoing _I miss you_ in his head, but he could not presently remember what those things might be.

He got back at three, but Steve was out running, and after that there was another meeting about finalizing some vendor partnership Tony didn’t care about, and then he had to let someone from accounting walk him through last year’s financial records to sign off on some corrections, and then a dinner honoring a sixty-years employee of SI. Tony was definitely going to give Pepper a raise. He didn’t get home until ten, and Steve was already in bed, his floor controls set to private.

He was home most of the following day, but Steve had a thing scheduled with the Smithsonian. They crossed paths briefly, as Tony was getting ready for dinner with one of the board members who got antsy any time Pepper took a vacation (which, luckily, was almost never). He swung by the common area on his way out to verify with independent observers that his suit was okay, and Steve was there sprawled on the couch, his eyes shut, while Nat and Bruce played chess in the corner.

How good it would be to lie down on top of Steve and feel his arms close around him and never get up again.

Bruce and Natasha weren’t paying attention. They were fiercely competitive at chess, or any game they both played. Natasha was used to winning, and she didn’t always win against Bruce. So Tony leaned over the back of the couch and trailed two fingers up Steve’s stomach. Steve opened his eyes and smiled, in that order, seeing Tony first, then smiling.

“Hey,” said Steve.

“Hey,” said Tony. “So I think Thursday.”

Steve hadn’t been smiling before. His smile before didn’t count. No smile Tony had ever seen on his face before counted, next to this. “Yeah?” he said, blindingly happy. Happy in every line of him.

_Are you sure?_ Tony wanted to ask, didn’t want to ask. He slid his eyes over to Bruce and Natasha, questioningly.

“Oh,” said Steve, tilting his head back to look, too. “I don’t care. Why would I care? Can you come here?”

Bruce looked over as Tony was crossing around the couch, and Tony shrugged at him. He settled himself on the floor, which would crease his trousers but who cared, and threw an elbow over the couch cushion beside Steve’s stomach.

He’d thought Steve wanted to kiss him, had arranged himself to be easily kissable, but Steve curved his torso slightly to rest his head against Tony’s, and that was all.

Steve whispered, “Go to dinner. I really really want to do Thursday,” and that was all.

**

Thursday was Wakanda damage control day, as well as everything else, and Tony regretted making it the night on which he had to be his utmost best self for Steve. The Wakandan embassy wasn’t angry. They just wanted to understand. Help us understand, Mr. Stark. When we spoke with Miss Potts, it was our agreement that this would travel no further. Help us understand what went wrong here.

Nothing. Nothing went wrong. We helped you ward off a security crisis. Who says it was someone on my end who fucked it up.

If next time, suggested the Wakandan embassy, you simply alerted us to your suspicions. Shared intelligence, as is official policy.

Ah but, and forgive me for not making this clear, Steve Rogers was sad, and I very much wanted him not to become sadder. You see the problem.

Tony hadn’t said anything he wanted to say in the last fortnight, and he didn’t say anything he wanted to say to the Wakandan ambassador, either. He got home later than he wanted, had less time than he wanted to get dressed before he was supposed to meet Steve downstairs. And it felt stupid anyway, to meet Steve downstairs, to be, to be Steve’s date, like they were kids, like they didn’t see each other every day anyway.

He felt unsettled. He had been wanting this for two weeks (also, forever), and now he wished he could stay home and make upgrades to his suit.

Downstairs was Steve. Steve was downstairs where he was supposed to be, standing stiff and correct like he was a kid waiting for a prom date, not that Steve knew about proms. “Hey there, Captain,” said Tony. “Wanna get this show on the road?”

Sometimes he could hear it in his own voice, the way he kept possibly-unsafe people at a safe distance. You could be aware of it and still not be able to stop it, he had found. Steve’s smile faltered. Tony had a hard time remembering how he had ever felt sure of this, of its being a good idea.

“The Wakanda meetings were bad?” Steve asked, tentative, in the cab. They were going downtown, a restaurant Steve had chosen. Italian because Steve always chose Italian restaurants.

“It is what it is,” said Tony, resorting to platitudes. If he could have climbed on Steve’s lap, put his tongue down Steve’s throat, that would have been easy. He knew where everything went, when it was about sex. Words, feelings, dicks.

“I’d do it for you,” said Steve, “if I could.”

“I know.”

Steve watched him for a moment longer, then slid over in the seat and put his arms around him, resting his head on Tony’s shoulder and his own upper arm. Awkwardly—he was so so bad at this, Steve would notice and he would leave—Tony put his head down on Steve’s. Wakanda was okay. This was okay too. Unruined. It was.

“I’m paying for dinner, by the way,” said Steve.

“What?” Tony said, picking up his head. He wasn’t really surprised. He’d known Steve would say this, and he sounded almost normal, he was doing it almost right. “Not fair!”

“Yes fair. I asked you out, so that is fair. That’s the rules of dating.” Steve let go of him, but he kept his hands and Tony’s tangled together, on the seat between them.

“I can’t buy you dinner, but you can buy me dinner?”

“You can pay next time,” said Steve, like there would be a next time.

Downtown, Steve got out of the cab first and held Tony’s hand on the short walk to the restaurant and floated a hand by Tony’s lower back, to guide him to their table. Tony wanted to press back into the touch, but, “People have cell phones,” he reminded Steve, as they were sitting down, unfolding napkins, being poured water.

“Yeah?” said Steve.

“So—” Tony shook his head. “They’ll take pictures of us.”

Captain America and the Merchant of Death. Page Six for details. Later, when this was done, Tony would be able to find them online, pictures of Steve still liking him.

He shook his head again, brought himself back. Steve was staring at him in that straight, unwavering way he had. “We don’t have to do this, you know.”

Tony swallowed. “Little late to be getting second thoughts, champ.”

“That is not what I—” Steve sighed. Steve always sighed, at Tony.

“Not what you,” Tony prompted.

“Are you mad about something?”

See. Not even ten minutes into the first date, and Tony was already fucking it up. “No. Yes, kind of. What do you mean, we don’t have to do this? You said Thursday. You said you definitely wanted to.” You said you missed me.

“Not the date,” said Steve. He was getting pissed off; Tony was exceptionally good at pissing him off, which was another reason this was a bad idea. “I meant we don’t have to do the whole— I can be more, um. Subtle? Not look so much like I’m taking you out. If you want.”

“Hey, it’s your call. I’m not the one with a reputation to uphold.”

Steve kept looking at him. It was unbearable, the expectant, moral way Steve looked at him. Tony thought that he was going to have to say something awful, just to stop him from looking that way, except that Steve, without any warning, kicked him in the shin. Tony yelped, and then started laughing. “You kicked me! You just kicked me under the table!”

Steve did his not-laugh laugh. “I guess you owe me one then.”

Tony kicked back, and Steve’s face smoothed out into a smile, and then he actually, properly laughed. It was the best noise Tony had ever heard. “Were you always this much of a brat, secretly?” Tony asked.

“I keep it under wraps,” said Steve, straight-faced, “when I’m not trying to seduce someone.”

Tony laughed so hard he got the hiccups and had to drink out of the opposite side of his water glass to get rid of them. Steve looked disgustingly pleased with himself. Tony kicked him again, and Steve leaned over, covered Tony’s wrists with his hands, and said, “Better watch it. No suit to make you big and strong. I could take you.”

“My suit's not just—” Tony said, and stopped because there was no tenable way to end that sentence. Earnestness was not in keeping with the Tony Stark brand. The suit had kept him alive. The suit was a weapon, and proof that he was more than a weapon. When the suit fucked up, he fixed it and the mistake did not recur.

He looked up, and found Steve’s blue eyes steady and sympathetic on his face.

“Your suit’s really good,” said Steve, and he let go of Tony’s arms. “Hey. Speaking of which! I know you haven’t had a chance, um, the mock-ups for more stuff you could add to my suit? Make it more space-age like we talked about? But I’m—I can’t wait to see that, whatever you come up with. End up coming up with. I told Clint I was going to look cooler than him.”

“You’re not,” Tony said. “You have a dorky America-themed helmet, and Clint wears black leather. He will always look cooler than you. We’d have to change your whole aesthetic.”

Steve grinned. “I honestly thought there would be perks to dating you. This is very disappointing so far.” Then, because he was Steve, he added, “This is not disappointing at all so far.”

“Except it took way too long to happen,” Tony pointed out. “Because of me.”

“Well it’s happening now.” Steve waited until Tony took a sip of water, then said, “I could wear black leather.”

Tony didn’t choke, but it was a close thing.

**

The date was good. It had been years since Tony had been out on what he would classify as a first date—he mostly met people out and fucked them and that was it—but he thought this was good. It was good already when Steve laughed. Good on the cab drive home, the way Steve couldn’t stop touching him, tracing the line of his smile on his face, playing with his fingers, nuzzling at his shoulder until Tony laughed, undid his own seatbelt, and kissed him.

Steve kissed him back was the thing.

Steve had kissed him _first._ If there was a reason besides busyness that Tony hadn’t mentioned this whole thing to anyone, it was that he did not consider it likely anybody would believe him. One minute terror birds. Next minute kissing. Far more likely to be the product of a diseased mind.

“You unbuckled your seatbelt!” Steve objected, when Tony rose to his knees on the seat. (He liked being taller, that little bit, taller enough that he had to lean down to kiss Steve’s stupid perfect mouth.) Tony swung one leg over Steve’s lap, straddling him, and Steve shuddered and shut his eyes.

_Look at you,_ thought Tony. _Look what I can do to you._

Because Steve was a spoilsport, he made Tony get off and buckle his seatbelt back, which Tony did on the condition that when they got in the elevator at the tower, Steve would shove him up against the wall of it.

(Under oath, Tony would have to confess that he was hoping he could get Steve to change his mind about no sex right away.)

Even with all the touching, even with the five glasses of wine Tony drank at dinner, it was awkward getting back to the tower. They both felt the shift in mood as soon as they walked in the door. Jarvis greeted them, that was one problem. They had fought in just about every common area of the Tower, that was another. Coming back home felt like being caught out in a lie.

“Elevator,” Tony reminded Steve.

“Carefully,” Steve stipulated.

“Or, or, let me run an alternative by you, very much un-carefully.” Tony punched the elevator button.

Steve said, straight out, like it was normal, “I don’t want to, um, have sex tonight. Okay?”

It occurred to Tony that he had thought the word “straight” about Steve at least twelve times that evening. “We don’t have to have sex. I’m, uh—but—” (But you want to, right? Sometime, eventually?)

“Um,” said Steve. The elevator came, and they got in it. Nobody pressed a button. The jury was still out on what button they’d each be pressing.

“If you’re going to tell me this can’t be a thing—”

“What? No. I was—I wondered if you’d want to come. Um.”

“Yes please,” Tony said, to make Steve blush.

Steve didn’t blush. He chuckled quietly and brought their joined hands to his mouth so he could kiss Tony’s knuckles. Fuck, Tony was gone for him. “No. I was wondering if you’d want to spend the night with me. But not have sex. You don’t have to, I just, I don’t want to stop being with you. And it would be nice, I thought it might be nice, um. Just. To be in the same place, be quiet together.”

Tony bit his tongue hard enough that he tasted blood. “This is how much I talk, Cap. Not like I’ve made any big fucking secret of it.”

“That isn’t what—” Steve looked down at his hands. “When I say something and you think there’s more than one thing I might mean by it, could you not—always assume I mean the worst one?”

Here was the problem with Steve. With this. Steve thought he was saying, _think well of me._ Really he wanted Tony to agree to something far more dangerous. Pretend you aren’t poison. Pretend the whole world doesn’t know. Pretend there is someone you’ve fooled.

He was, actually, asking the impossible: Lay down your weapons.

From under his ridiculous eyelashes, Steve was watching him intently. Tony was simultaneously irritated and desperately turned on.

Steve said, “What? Why is that so—”

_What about when you do mean the worst one?_

“Yeah, fine,” Tony said. He could see that Steve didn’t quite believe him. But that was just because Steve thought Tony was saying yes to the assuming the worst question, when in fact he was saying yes to the sleeping together question. Steve’s own fault for failing to demand specificity.

The next second, he found himself crowded into one corner of the elevator by six feet of supersoldier. Steve nudged his chin sideways and kissed down his throat, long fingers pulling at the collar of his shirt to gain access to skin. Tony’s hips jerked.

“Oh really?” murmured Steve into his shoulder.

“Shut up, asshole.”

Steve pulled back to grin down into Tony’s eyes, which was, fuck, which was really quite something. “Aw hell,” Steve said. “I like you so much. Jarvis, six.”

“Bossy. The elevator has buttons.”

“So do you.” As the elevator started to move, Steve undid the button of Tony’s suit jacket and slid his hands underneath, pressing him back against the wall. It was way the fuck hotter than Tony had been imagining. In the car, in his bedroom, Steve had been gentle and tentative, letting Tony take the lead. Now he had orders and was hellbent on executing them to the full extent of his considerable powers. That was how he kissed. All concentration, all intention. When Tony pushed at Steve a little, hungry for more, Steve pushed back harder, pinning him with hands and hips.

Tony couldn’t stop thinking of the other things he could ask, order, Steve to do. Imagine this, but a blow job. This, but fucking. He moaned.

Steve tipped his head back and away. Desperate, Tony chased it backward. “What are you doing?”

“Elevator stopped,” Steve said. He was trying to sound normal, military, but his voice shook. His lips were red and wet, and he was hard against Tony. If someone caught them, if the elevator stopped at a wrong floor and Steve had to turn around, it would be so fucking obvious. What they’d been doing. That Steve wanted him.

“Your mouth,” said Tony softly, touching his fingers to his own lips.

Steve closed his hand over Tony’s wrist, lightly, and brought the hand to his mouth. Slightly overcome, Tony sagged against the wall. “Jesus fucking fuck, you should come with a warning label.”

He’d thought Steve was going to kiss his fingers. But when he opened his eyes again, Steve was gazing, tight-lipped, at his palm, the still-healing cuts across it. Oh good. Get him thinking about blood and hangovers, very sexy, great work, Stark. Tony closed his hand into a loose fist.

“I’m sorry,” said Steve.

“I’m not your job,” said Tony. Coolly.

“No, I know.” Without letting go of Tony’s wrist, he backed up, out of the elevator onto his floor of the tower. “I wanted to kiss you. I couldn’t— I wanted to kiss you and I couldn’t and, so. It was selfish, I was being selfish.”

“You already—well number one, you don’t need to apologize because I’m not your job, and number two, you already did apologize and that was a whole—” Now Steve did press Tony’s hand to his mouth, settling his lips just above Tony’s fingernails, and it became impossible to keep talking.

“I’ll be more,” Steve said, muffled.

_Fuck off more careful,_ thought Tony, anticipating him. He didn’t need careful.

But Steve gave Tony’s hand back to him and said, “Honest.”

The moment held between them, fragile. Tony thought about what it would mean to promise the same back.

Lay down your weapons.

“I know you will,” said Tony, and Steve smiled.

“Okay,” said Steve. “Good. So. Good. Can I—”

(Yes.)

Tony let himself be moved through the rooms of Steve’s place, stripped of his jacket, and sat firmly down on Steve’s bed. Steve handed him the StarkPad he’d given Steve months ago—Tony had a newer model now, but he didn’t want to tell this to Steve—and said, “No shoes on my sheets.” When Tony bent to take his shoes off, Steve swooped down, fast, to kiss the nape of his neck.

Still not sure what he was supposed to be doing, and Tony hated not being sure what he was supposed to be doing, he swung his legs up onto the bed. (Steve’s bed, Steve’s bed, Steve’s bed.)

“Good,” said Steve again. He climbed onto the bed and lay down on his back, head in Tony’s lap.

Tony smiled. “Comfy?”

Steve said, “Mm-hm. This okay? You can get work done like this?” He had an open book propped on his chest. Bedtime reading.

“Yep,” said Tony. He could, logistically. Rest the tablet on his other leg. In practice, it remained to be seen whether he could do anything with Steve’s head in his lap. If it had been his bedroom, where he could have played around on real screens, maybe. As it was, Steve kept looking away from his book to press his face affectionately into Tony’s abdomen, or occasionally, to wait for Tony to look down at him and then give him a heart attack of a smile.

Think well of me.

After a while, Steve sat up and put his book face-down on the bedside table on the opposite end of the bed. “I’m going to go to sleep on you,” he announced. “Okay?”

God, yes. Yes, always. “Book’s not keeping your attention?” Tony glanced over at the bedside table, and his heart missed a beat. “Hey Steve.”

Steve said, innocently, “Yes?”

“You—” The book spine was facing Tony, and he leaned as far over as he could and grabbed it. _The Clocks,_ by Agatha Christie.

“Hm?” said Steve, but he was smiling now (he didn’t have much of a poker face).

“You kept the books,” Tony said. There was no way for his voice to sound except exactly how he felt, charmed beyond measure that Steve had changed his mind and this was how he was telling him.

“Thank you for buying them for me, Tony. It was really nice.” Steve kissed Tony’s cheek and then settled himself on his side, his cheek against Tony’s thigh. “And thanks for coming to dinner,” he added. “I had a good time. We should do it again. You’re a comfy pillow.”

Tony wanted to make a joke about how anything had to be comfier than the shit pillows Steve owned, but he couldn’t get it out. When he stroked careful fingers through Steve’s hair, Steve made a tiny, contented noise.

After Steve had fallen asleep, Tony opened up the book, cautious not to let Steve’s bookmark slip out. The flyleaf was blank.

Steve hadn’t written in his name in them.

(Lay down your weapons.)

He was reading them, but he hadn’t put his name on the flyleaf.

_When you think there’s more than one thing I might mean by it—_

Well.

Tony wrapped Steve around himself like a blanket, and went to sleep, too.


End file.
